Achieving Next-Generation Visibility: The Three Levels of Technology Collaboration

The complexity and interconnectedness of today's supply chain visibility solutions make them more vulnerable to disruptions, from shipping or weather delays to pandemics, cyberattacks, and natural catastrophes.

Due to interruptions, businesses prioritise supply chain resilience. Supply networks that can withstand these disruptions. Besides, supply chain teams should communicate information with stakeholders and interact with the appropriate people at the right time to address problems efficiently. They need the proper tools and practices to make supply chain cooperation smooth.

Directors/ Editors note:

According to IDC, a supply chain control tower enables worldwide freight surveillance, analytics, and automated decision-making.

Three main factors influence real-time supply chain visibility. 

First, consumer-centric supply chain

People may purchase nearly anything, anytime, using several means. It pressures supply chains for volume and scalability to become agile, responsive and fluid.

The Second Stage

It is the change of linear supply chains dedicated to delivering pallets and truckloads into grid-based, many-to-many nodal value networks, allowing for more excellent customer responsiveness. It has led to fewer and more frequent shipments, a focus on seamless data flow and increased inventory visibility complexity.

Technical progress

Finally, technical progress is accelerating, allowing us unprecedented visibility. We are going beyond ubiquitous technology like GPS signals to a future where the Internet of Things and its sensors are widespread and where enhanced computing power and machine learning enable the mining and processing of vast volumes of unconnected data. To fully benefit from these innovations, supply chains must construct a collaborative "environment" that combines different technologies.

New approaches to achieving visibility

For years, individual, closed networks offering direct connectivity to suppliers and logistics providers have visibility of a specific supply chain. Indeed, that visibility continues to be available, but it is becoming widely recognised that this type of network is cumbersome and expensive. Now, as the three forces outlined above continue to converge and spark innovation, we are seeing the emergence of several new approaches to achieving visibility:

Aggregated networks

Network aggregators provide one of the more widely available forms of visibility. These usually manifest themselves in supplier portals or mode-specific carrier networks (ocean or truck networks, for example). They often offer more than just "current state" visibility; for example, by providing transactional processing into and out of the network.

The real-time trackers

Similar to an aggregated network, this form of visibility focuses on tapping into near real-time location tracking, "breadcrumbing" (visually representing a travel path), and geo-fence manipulation to get a better picture of assets in motion.

The insight creators

The newest generation of visibility capabilities takes a step beyond simply understanding where something is and instead seeks to know where it will be, moving from real-time tracking to predictive. This approach combines multiple streams of seemingly unrelated structured and unstructured data. 

While the growth of visibility technology is exciting and presents tremendous opportunities, technology alone will not achieve the ultimate goal of supply chain fluidity and resiliency. Visibility without intelligent action is of limited value. A car with advanced sensors and warnings but poor brakes and steering will have difficulty avoiding an identified potential collision. Similarly, a supply chain with advanced visibility but poor end-to-end supply chain planning and execution systems will have challenges responding to identified disruptions.

The collaborative pyramid in technology

Different stakeholders will make the visibility of the supply chain challenges. Technology collaboration is critical. These must occur at each of the pyramid's three levels:

Structured and unstructured data about suppliers, carriers, transactions, events, social media, GPS broadcasts, weather, and so on include in the foundation layer. This data is everywhere, expanding, and only limited by one's ability to devise new ways to get it.

The intermediate layer makes up of visibility aggregators and insight-generation tools. Existing and potential technologies vary significantly in this regard. Supplier and carrier portals give transactional and event visibility, but they often focus on data cleansing and integration rather than advanced data science. 

The pyramid's peak represents operational supply chain planning and execution solutions that "digest" inputs from the lower tiers and take intelligent, responsive action. It is another challenging foundational skill to master. While end-to-end supply chain planning and execution solutions are mature and widely available, consuming and acting on this new generation of data demands a higher level of solution maturity and openness. This top layer includes industry context (fashion retail has different operational processes and KPIs than industrial manufacturing), constraint representation, rapid solution, and open connectivity.

Using this technique, it is easy to see that the larger the pyramid's base, the more original the insights, and the more complicated the actionable solutions, the greater the visibility—and hence the resilience and value produced. For accurate supply chain visibility, all pyramid tiers must be represented and work together; a single solution supplying just one visibility component will not suffice.

Supply chain technology is evolving to incorporate more conveniently available data sources from best-of-breed technology solution providers. It enables supply chain participants to make more active, dynamic decisions that reduce network latency, improve resilience, and protect profit margins. They will gain a competitive advantage as a supply chain visibility ecosystem allows them to be more responsive.

These collaborative solutions will foster speed and agility while providing a factual basis for decisions that yield the most profit without compromising service by improving real-time visibility across supply chain resources.

Bottom Line

Supply Technologies' unified ERP solution enables effective, efficient customer communication. Our (Cozentus) solution allows everyone worldwide to see what's occurring when and where through an easy-to-navigate dashboard. The platform may assess previous operations, forecast future demands using "what if" modelling, comprehend and plan replenishment cycles, handle accounting processes, measure productivity, and cooperate throughout the supply management process. The system's openness and interoperability allow it to interface with clients' older systems.