How valuable is visibility in supply chains? Is it worth investing in?
Supply chain visibility allows companies to keep track of inventory and activity as goods or products transit. It allows shippers to improve customer service and control costs by managing inventory in motion, providing proactive status updates, reducing disruptions, and minimizing risk. As a result, the supply chain becomes more robust and more transparent.
Visibility into your supply chain is essential to take control of risks while gaining advanced insights. Combining those insights with user data results in an optimized supply chain that is highly efficient.
By leveraging supply chain management providers like Monitor Pro, you can improve customer service, reduce costs, and streamline your supply chain.
Having a good understanding of supply chain visibility starts with considering the challenges and solutions associated with it.
Supply Chain Visibility: The Challenges
An IBM study found that 87% of Chief Supply Chain Officers (CSCOs) find it difficult to forecast and manage disruptions in their supply chain, and 84% cite lack of visibility as their greatest challenge.
Understanding your company’s supply chain is crucial to its success. For a business to remain healthy with a functional supply chain having full visibility into all supply chain processes is crucial.
If you lack supply chain visibility, the following are some of the challenges your business may face:
Interruptions
Managing your supply chain is becoming more complex. Without using technology to understand customer behavior and predict demand, you may have to deal with insufficient or excessive inventory, dissatisfied customers, and bad reviews.
Bad data
Your supply chain relies heavily on data. The problem is that if you can’t easily see your data and if it is scattered across a number of disparate systems, you won’t have the insights you need to create unity in your supply chain, improve collaboration, and predict changes in the business. Supply chain visibility systems from Monitor Pro can help your businesses to collect, analyze and share insights through a unified dashboard.
Bad suppliers
Now more than ever, companies are scrutinized about who they do business with. As a result, businesses focus more on brand alignment and ethical standards, making supplier visibility more essential.
Disruption
In the post-pandemic world, your supply chains are being disrupted and modified at every stage. Having visibility may not save you from COVID like unprecedented disruption. Still, it can help you look at the bigger picture, understand your business, provide room for innovation to drive growth, reduce costs and enable a consistent customer experience.
Supply Chain Visibility: The Solution
Through Monitor Pro, companies can monitor their assets across extremely large supply networks and respond immediately to any changes. There are several ways to improve supply chain visibility and sustainability. First, the creation of automated tools for supply chain visibility allows for a more efficient supply chain.
Here are a few things you can accomplish with new-age tools:
Define shopping experience
Understand your customers and align with their evolving behaviors; deliver personalized experiences and build customer loyalty.
Enable seamless communication with suppliers
Implement Electronic data interchange (EDI) to facilitate computer-to-computer exchange of data among multiple stakeholders and trading partners. EDI standardizes documents, converts them into machine-readable formats and is helpful for effective supply chain management. Utilizing EDI, you can help reduce lead time, documentation processing cost, eliminate errors, and more.
Make data-driven decisions
Whenever supplier information is updated manually, you risk having errors and fail to identify potential risks. When you have real-time visibility into data, the picture changes. Monitor Pro allows you to get to the most granular aspects and study your supply chain information, helping you make better supply chain decisions.
Go the extra mile for your customers
Flexible supply chains are key to meeting customer demands. You can better cater to the needs of your customers by understanding your supply chain processes in real-time. Unfortunately, most companies do not have much visibility beyond their Tier 1 suppliers, and what they do have is limited. Therefore, maintaining supplier data on all, and not just Tier 1 suppliers, should be part of your overall process.
Visibility becomes increasingly essential as supply chains grow and expand. A more planned workflow can result in less disruptions, fewer late deliveries, and a better workflow. Monitor Pro helps you accomplish this. It helps you identify, prioritize, and solve supply chain challenges faster and avoid costly issues altogether.
Schedule a consultation with the experts at Monitor Pro and learn more about our services!
