Is your supply chain agile and adequately flexible? A good supply chain visibility gives you better control over your accountability, efficiency, and reliability. Supply chain visibility is a key factor to determine logistics success. When you can see every step in the process, you can address and rectify bottlenecks while measuring outcomes to create value adds.
Supply chain visibility is important to track goods and products, as they travel from their source to the destination. It enables shippers to improve customer service and cost through better inventory management, real-time status updates, restricting disruptions and mitigating risks, therefore, improving supply chain visibility. It provides knowledge at the right time to leverage actionable results. Greater visibility means better cost savings and operational efficiency.
The goal of supply chain visibility is to gather insights of user data and then integrate with your supply chain process to optimize it for better results.
Here Are The Major Challenges Due To Poor Supply Chain Visibility
1. Customer Dissatisfaction
An unhappy customer implies a loss in business. Due to superlative customer experience benchmarked by companies like Amazon, customers across sectors have high expectations for knowing the real-time status of their orders, which applies to other businesses as well. One way to gauge the services of a company is through the proactive communication received from the company when it comes to its delivery. Better supply chain visibility means greater access to data, letting companies develop more product-centric information that can improve operations ranging from planning, reducing, and avoiding costs to increase operational efficiency.
2. Port Congestion Costs Delays
The global crisis plagued with ports have been a major problem for supply chain leaders. The delays have significantly translated into a loss of dollars. Having access to basic information on real-time global port congestion could help process shipments more seamlessly and help proactively assess uncertainties and chart out an alternate course of action, which would impact costs.
3. Incurring Additional Costs
Having zero visibility and control over your shipments owing to factors like geopolitical tensions, pandemic, fluctuating trade policies, and weather disruptions result in incurring additional costs.
Key Benefits of Supply Chain Visibility
Ensuring clear visibility of the supply chain value chain can save you from incurring operational costs like lost or compromised shipments leading to improved workflow, and increased profits. Real-time insights can help you save extra dollars while reducing risks.
Let’s dive into a few other benefits of supply chain visibility.
- Mitigate risk: Managing a supply chain rooted in robust analytics and clear communication will reduce potential roadblocks and lead to commendable results.
- Enable agility: Visibility lets you become more agile when managing a supply chain, allowing you to make relevant changes to increase your productivity.
- Increase speed: When you make decisions backed by data, you can fast-track the entire process and make an informed move.
- Superior customer experience: Supply chains need to be able to adapt quickly to meet customer demands. Complete visibility will help you determine what you need to do to align your goals to meet increased customer demands.
- Data-driven results: Visibility into all aspects of your supply chain let’s you access large amounts of data, therefore, helping shippers make fast and data-backed decisions leading to supply chain success.
How To Achieve Better Supply Chain Visibility
A superior supply chain visibility can be achieved through improved awareness.
Deploying best technology: Visibility is about ensuring that everyone involved in the supply chain process has improved visibility into the supply chain operations. Visibility coupled with data-driven insights can resolve efficiency issues seamlessly.
Invest in improving capabilities: Training employees to be versatile in their role instead of focusing on specialization, should be the primary focus of any organization considering supply chain efficiency. This will increase their visibility across all tiers of the supply chain.
Focus on workflow: Making quick critical decisions, without compromising on visibility, requires a strong workflow. Your team, therefore, needs to be better equipped to interpret data and independently resolve issues to smoothly run operations.
Final Thoughts
The rise of digital supply chain networks has caused the industry to drastically shift although supply chains have been traditionally built to focus on logistics. Visibility becomes increasingly important as supply chains become more expansive which often leads to limiting disruptions, improving workflow and preventing late deliveries.
Leveraging real-time tracking and data-driven KPIs to evaluate supply chain performance drives better logistics by eliminating bottlenecks.
Increased demand for a better supply chain is forcing logistics providers to uncover pain points within the supply chain and resolve them. The rewards of supply chain visibility are multi-fold such as automated ordering, quotation, and route optimization.
Supply chains include all the systems, vendors, suppliers and processes involved in designing, making, selling, storing, shipping and delivering a product. The rising complexity of getting products to a growing customer base across different platforms requires innovative supply chain management to maintain robust and agile systems to identify and rectify issues. Therefore, sustaining an agile, stable and robust supply chain requires a long-term investment of money and time. With proactive strategies, accountability and greater visibility, your organization can convert your losses into greater opportunities with a single click with Elchemy’s supply chain tech capabilities.
