Supply Chain Visibility: Definition and Importance

Attaining ample data visibility within your e-commerce enterprise allows for reaping multiple benefits. Tracking, analyzing, and forecasting are valuable to businesses since these activities provide an opportunity to make considered decisions and build resilience. Not only does data visibility help merchants to achieve higher customer satisfaction but also lets organizations minimize the e-commerce fulfillment cost.

This article tends to dive deeper into the concept of supply chain visibility and answer the essential questions of what are the main goals of supply chain visibility, the issues affecting it, and what technology to consider for implementing clear data-driven strategies.

What Is Supply Chain Visibility?

Supply chain visibility (SCV) is the ability to track raw materials, components, and merchandise throughout the transportation of products from manufacturers/suppliers to end consumers.

As long as a business grows, expands its product assortment and branches, and conquers new foreign markets, its supply chain network is gradually becoming a more complex structure too. This also calls for identifying potential environmental, social, and governance risks, which brings the problem of having to track data from various sources simultaneously, establishing firm connectivity between different organizations, and, thus, necessitates the need for a reliable system that can put all data together.

SCV heavily relies on digital technology, which precisely enables easy and secure access to data, its monitoring, display, and analysis in real time and across different departments, warehouses, and sales channels.

Why Does Your Supply Chain Visibility Matter?

Supply chain visibility is among the top strategic priorities of companies worldwide. Here are several reasons why having high visibility into the conditions of products in your supply chain has become indispensable.

1. Enhanced planning. Having a centralized system with superb search capacities allows merchants to seamlessly extract hard-to-get data and make use of it while planning future workloads, for instance, forecasting seasonal demand and developing corresponding logistics strategies.
2. Disruption mitigation. SCV provides an overall look at supply chain operations. Hence, in case of any supply chain disruptions, merchants can immediately detect the problem and take fast actions accordingly. SCV, due to a strong data analysis, can also make a due contribution to reducing potential supply chain issues, such as transport bottlenecks, labor shortages, or inventory shortfalls.
3. Improved collaboration and increased speed of order fulfillment. A fully automated supply chain network brings the product data, people, and business processes together into a secure, single source of truth. It encourages transparency and enables cooperation with external supply chain partners in a more efficient way, which, in turn, will allow you to obtain supplies timely and please your clientele with fast order fulfillment.

Technologies that Increase Supply Chain Visibility

The rapid technological advancement proves its worth. Now, any possible business process can be automated, tracked, and analyzed, including supply chain operations. So what technology to consider to get a big picture view of your supply chain?

Internet of Things (IoT)

IoT refers to connected physical devices that receive and transfer data throughout a wireless network. This is a general definition, but how can IoT be beneficial for supply chain visibility improvement?

IoT devices provide visibility into cargo shipping. Such IoT-based shipping solutions are widely used for reporting in real time about freight location or sending notifications about any changes in the route.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The scope of AI applications in e-commerce is quite broad. These can be conversational chatbots, recommendation systems, personalized search, etc. No wonder AI is also found application in supply chain activities.

Supply chain managers actively leverage AI tools to predict demand and enhance supplier relationship management and utilize AI-enabled computer vision systems to automate and improve the quality control of finished products.

Another field of AI application is sustainability management. Thus, this advancement is frequently used for logistics routes optimization to make supply chain operations greener, while businesses — trendier.

Transportation Management Systems (TMS)

TMS is a logistics system, aimed at helping businesses to plan, execute, and optimize product transportation and receive valuable data on day-to-day transportation operations, trade compliance information and documentation, and ascertaining timely delivery of orders.

Typically, TMS comes with various functions to keep supply chain visibility at a high level. Some of them are planning and decision making, real-time transportation tracking, service quality control, transport costs and scheme simulation, and freight audit.

Conclusion

62% of companies have limited visibility of their supply chain and 15% only have visibility on production. Supply chain visibility might be quite useful for you, as it will give you a competitive edge over rivals who have not yet taken the path of automating their supply chain activities.

As an e-commerce software development company, we can deliver a package of e-commerce solutions, tailored to your specific business needs and requirements. Contact us to discuss your upcoming supply chain automation project!