Organizations ready to walk down the supply chain visibility road!

Global supply chains had to endure a lot during the outbreak of Covid-19. Even before the arrival of the pandemic global supply chains was bogged down by long-standing challenges, and it will not be a sweeping statement to make if one says Covid-19 broke the back of even the most well-established supply chains. One thing that stood out amid Covid-19 challenging times is the importance of supply chain visibility.

Supply chain visibility has become a matter of increasing importance for organizations across the globe. Organizations are cognizant about the fact that supply chain visibility holds the key toward delivering enhanced profitability, accelerated customer experience, and lower operating costs.One has to understand that exceptional, unforeseen events can challenge even the best of supply chains. To put it straight – no supply chain can claim that they have all the answers to such unforeseen events that crop up from time to time. Never before, access to real-time data has got so much more importance than now.

Evolving customer expectations coupled with the pressing need to make operations cost-effective are making organizations accord high priority to supply chain visibility issue. In fact, organizations are waking up to the fact that supply chains cannot afford to work in silos anymore – systems working in silos pose another major barrier to improving supply chain visibility. If disparate IT architectures are not interoperable, it becomes difficult to gain a holistic view of supply chain operations and ensure seamless logistics operations. For example, if there is a complete disconnect between an order management system and a transport management system, it will be tough to allocate delivery jobs and track goods that are in transit. According to a study, 94% of organizations said that they do not have full supply chain visibility (of their operations).

Why supply chain visibility has emerged as a key focus area of organizations? It is because traditional supply methods of executing operations have inherent limitations as far as driving end-to-end operational visibility is concerned. These age-old practices have been heavily reliant on manual processes, which makes it exceedingly challenging for organizations to track and trace ground-level supply chain activities like warehousing, delivery operations, in-plant movements of goods, etc. The hassle is that such an exercise increases operational expenses, risks and prolongs delivery cycles across supply chains.

Clearly, supply chain decision-making will be critical for organizations to ensure their supply chains are resilient and future-ready.