This article will discuss the roadmap to supply chain visibility, detailing the steps you need to take to get there. We will cover the following topics:

• What is supply chain visibility?
• The benefits of supply chain visibility
• The challenges of achieving supply chain visibility
• The steps to achieving supply chain visibility
• Frequently asked questions about supply chain visibility
• Conclusion

What is Supply Chain Visibility?

Supply Chain Visibility (SCV) is the ability to track all operations in your supply chain and have accessibility to the data at every step: inventory, orders, shipments in transit, etc. Having supply chain visibility is critical for businesses that want to improve their efficiency and profitability. When you can see the entire supply chain, you can identify bottlenecks, reduce costs, and increase customer satisfaction.

The Benefits of Supply Chain Visibility

There is a lot to be gained for businesses looking to create (more) supply chain visibility:

1. Improved efficiency: Supply chain visibility enables organizations to identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies in their logistics ecosystem. By addressing these issues, businesses can improve their efficiency and reduce costs.
2. Better inventory management: Tracking inventory levels in real-time, enabling organizations to optimize their inventory levels and reduce excess stock.
3. Improved supplier collaboration: Easily identifying areas where they need to work with suppliers to improve efficiency and reduce costs, ultimately leading to better collaboration and more successful partnerships.
4. Enhanced customer satisfaction: Providing more accurate delivery dates and real-time updates to customers, greatly improving customer satisfaction.
5. Greater profitability: As a result of the above organization can increase their margins and profitability.

The Challenges of Achieving Supply Chain Visibility

While the benefits of supply chain visibility are clear, achieving it can be challenging. Digital transformation is required, but that’s exactly where the logistics industry is still somewhat leaping behind. A recent McKinsey study found that the average supply chain has a digitization level of 43%, which is the lowest of five business areas that Mckinsey examined. Only 2% of the executives who were surveyed, said the supply chain is the focus of their digital strategies. And it’s true that reaching visibility in supply chains comes with some obstacles to overcome:

1. Lack of data: Many businesses don’t have access to the data they need to achieve visibility. This can be due to a lack of technology or processes to capture and analyze data. Which makes sense for organizations who have yet to jumpstart digital transformation.
2. Siloed systems: Organizations, especially larger ones, can have siloed systems that do not communicate with each other, making it difficult to get a complete view of the supply chain.
3. Complexity: Supply chains can get quite complex, with many different suppliers, products, and transportation modes. Reaching visibility is directly impacted by the number of layers and nodes in the supply chain.
4. Cost: Achieving supply chain visibility can be expensive, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses who need to make investments in technology and sourcing expertise.

The Steps to Achieving Supply Chain Visibility

Despite the challenges, achieving supply chain visibility is not only possible, it is strongly advisable considering the many benefits. Here is what the roadmap looks like.

Step 1: Assess the Current State of Your Supply Chain

Before embarking on this journey, it’s essential to first understand the current state of your supply chain. You need to map out and evaluate how information flows across your supply chain, so bottlenecks or other pain points can emerge.

You’ll also need to evaluate the level of collaboration between stakeholders. This means in terms of processes and communications flows, but also their technological capabilities. You need to develop a really good understanding of your logistics ecosystem and all the components in it.

Assessing or auditing your supply chain can greatly benefit from external expertise, so that might definitely be worth exploring.

Step 2: Define Your Objectives

Reaching full visibility might not be the best objective to start off with. To date, there’s only a very small amount of organizations who have extensive supply chain visibility. The graph below illustrates this nicely.

It makes sense to aim at more realistic (intermediary) targets and set smart objectives like:

• removing internal data silos and building a solid technological foundation
• getting visibility in the initial Tier (Tier-1)
• set business-related objectives such as increased customer satisfaction

Organizations will need to create a very focused scope to identify what needs to be done and who needs to be involved. It’s the best way towards tangible results.

Step 3: Identify the Required Technology

There’s no supply chain visibility without the right technology. You need to identify the tech required to support the flow of information across your supply chain. This goes deeper than optimizing the systems that organizations already know and use:

• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Transportation Management Systems (TMS)
• Warehouse Management Systems (WMS)

It’s vital to connect these systems internally and externally, which also means modeling and formatting data so that data streams can be unified. Looking at your logistics ecosystem, you might need to integrate in different ways with different partners: API, EDI or hybrid.

Step 4: Develop a Data Strategy

Data is the main ingredient of any plan to increase supply chain visibility. But it might also be the hardest to grasp at first. You need to develop a data strategy that defines:

• what data is available,
• what data you is still missing and is needed
• how data will be collected
• how it needs to be mapped
• how data will be used
• how and to who it needs to be made accessible

The above items are basic components of a data strategy. Organizations will need to cover even more topics such as data quality, data security, and data privacy. All of this is essential for reaching solid visibility and making informed decisions based on accurate and reliable data.

A supply chain built on a firm data strategy that is translated to effective implementations will provide everyone in your logistics ecosystem with the right access to the right information. It will make it easier to fix bottlenecks and solve issues related to delays in a timely way and prevent supply chain disruptions.

This is a pressing topic for sure, as the turmoil of recent years has pushed supply chains toward digital transformation harder than before. As a result, we see that a data-driven supply chain is emerging as the shaping force of supply chain visibility.

Step 5: Build Collaborative Relationships with Stakeholders

It’s right there in the name, our supply chains are made up of connected “links”. If you’re serious about supply chain visibility, it is a must to take relationships with stakeholders to a higher level. Suppliers, partners, and customers alike.

Streamlining processes and integrating technologies are key, but they aren’t the only aspects of true collaborative relationships. Organizations have to cultivate a cooperative mindset that improves visibility through sharing data, information, and insights. And the businesses that succeed in this, will be the ones to thrive by turning supply chain uncertainty into opportunity.

Step 6: Implement and Monitor Progress

Finally, you need to implement your roadmap to supply chain visibility and monitor progress regularly. Split the holy grail of supply chain visibility up into smaller milestones. Install feedback loops within the different layers of your logistics ecosystems to make sure visibility is enhanced, not muddied. Aim for incremental increases in visibility and iterate following these steps:

1. Define the scope: What do you want to achieve with this milestone? What data do you need to collect? What processes do you need to improve?
2. Collect data: collect the data you need to achieve the next step on the ladder toward supply chain visibility. This may involve investing in new technology to capture data or improving your processes to ensure that data is captured accurately.
3. Analyze data: Once you have collected the data, you need to analyze it to gain insights into your supply chain. This may involve using analytics tools or working with a third-party provider.
4. Share data: After analyzing the data, you need to share it with relevant stakeholders, such as suppliers, customers, and internal teams. This will enable everyone to see the entire supply chain and identify areas for improvement.
5. Implement improvements: The final step is to implement improvements to your supply chain based on the insights you have gained.

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