Visibility: The value-add that you need to carve a competitive edge in a time of continuous disruption

Leveraging visibility for value

Over the past few years, supply chain visibility has transcended from being a “nice to have” to a “necessity”. There has always been inherent value in visibility, but this knowledge alone is insufficient to drive tangible ROI for businesses. Why could this be?

The first reason lies in where the organization sits on its level of digital adoption for visibility tools. Even today, many companies rely on legacy processes and manual ways of working. This includes inputting data on paper documents, sending back-and-forth emails and calls to coordinate with stakeholders, and working with siloed platforms to facilitate inventory and shipping management. Without a single, streamlined platform that conveys one view of truth, organizations are subjected to a supply chain pitfall that creates blind spots and inefficiencies, making it challenging to track shipments through their course in the supply chain efficiently.

Second, decision-makers must understand precisely how and when to leverage the visibility knowledge on their supply chain to deliver business-focused outcomes on revenue and costs. A well-rounded database provides the foundation for discerning relevant and actionable insights. However, it is equally important that decision-makers know what type of data they need, how to make use of these data points to draw up key insights, and when to make decisions based on the information they have on hand.?

This three-step process of decision-making may appear straightforward at the outset but in reality, can be affected by disruptive events. Disruption is no longer localized. The interconnectivity of our supply chain means that the effects of disruption ripple through global trade lanes. For example, how the latest strike action in Germany’s ports is creating worsening congestion across Northern Europe’s ports and how COVID-19 lockdowns affect a city’s production and shipping capabilities - in fact, Shanghai and Ningbo are now only starting to recover from their shipping backlog after moving out of lockdown earlier in June.?

Major disruptive events such as the ones listed above may alter the course of decision-making, and key stakeholders would need to consider alternative plans to fulfill their order commitments to their respective customers. For example, carriers may need to plan alternative trade routes or carry out a blank sailing to reach their destination port within a specific time frame.

Why it is beneficial to ensure there are no visibility gaps in your supply chain

Full visibility across your supply chain is essential to minimize and mitigate potential financial, business, and reputational risk. These benefits include, but are not limited to:

Having adequate time to respond proactively to disruptions

• Whether it’s a natural disaster or port closure, having supply chain visibility would allow decision-makers to be more aware of potential threats in advance, and have more time to devise the necessary crisis mitigation plans.

Accessing quality data to make important decisions, such as for cost-optimizing benefits

• If there are visibility gaps in your supply chain, or if your visibility data is sat between siloed platforms, it becomes more challenging to consolidate these data points to derive useful insights for making decisions for your supply chain.?
• For example, a retailer with access to critical supply chain visibility data can perform data analytics to forecast demand and avoid excess inventory at any point. This means that organizations could potentially reduce their inventory carrying cost - a sizable 20-30% [1]?of total inventory value.

Increasing revenue by improving the customer experience

• For retailers, winning new customers or retaining existing customers has a lot to do with delivering top-quality customer service. With increasing consumer demands, it becomes essential for retailers to communicate order statuses accurately and proactively with their customers.
• This means retailers must have full visibility of where those shipments are to provide accurate and consistent ETAs and updates to their customers.

Besides increasing revenue, having reliable information about the statuses of shipments to a given destination allows an organization to move it through the supply chain efficiently and sell it quicker. If an organization chooses to adopt lean, Just-In-Time, or any of several inventory strategies, it's more important than ever to have visibility into the supply chain. Even the slightest disruption to supply chains could be complex to resolve and remedy. Predicting, seeing, and responding instantaneously to changes in the supply chain is key to unlocking and growing shareholder value.

In other words,?it is business-critical for global supply chains to be synchronized, connected, and completely transparent through all the stakeholders – from factory to destination – both at the order and SKU level.?Businesses globally must have access to actionable insights (enabled by good data) from a connected 'all-stakeholders' data-driven perspective of the entire critical path to properly mitigate their risk. These outputs enable informed decision-making and execution in one place with certainty. The ROI that can be realized is significant –?enhancing customer service levels, as well as top-line and bottom-line?growth.

Speak to our team at?Gravity Supply Chain?for a complimentary consultation on how our?platform and modules?can help you attain the next level of visibility you need.

References:

[1]?https://www.tradegecko.com/inventory-management/introduction-to-carrying-costs