Supply Chain Visibility

As we consider the role of IT in current supply chain thinking, it is easy to get lost in prophesies of doom as in Rettig [1] or fall into the trap of thinking that carefully considered IT implementations can cure all of our woes.

One evolving aspect of supply chain development is the concept of Visibility – it is impossible to begin casting about for information on current thinking without encountering references to visibility and how to maximize it.

Check out this verbiage:

Infosys unveils enhanced Supply Chain Visibility & Collaboration Product Suite 

“New and enhanced product suite enables organizations to leverage closed loop analytics for unlocking efficiencies and strengthening their supply chain for collaborative decision making and actionable insights.” [2]

Sounds impressive, doesn’t it?

In short, the concept of Supply Chain Visibility simply refers to methods that make it easier for participants in a supply chain to see where everyone else is, ideally in real-time. For a supplier this might mean being able to track a customer’s inventory and current rate of consumption so that they are ready to produce and deliver when the customer needs to be restocked, but not before. For a manufacturer, “visibility” might mean real-time tracking of an anticipated delivery in order to adjust the tooling of a specific production line “just in time” in order to minimize disruption to work flow. The more various players in a given supply chain know about the state of their counterparts upstream and downstream, the more efficient their operations can become.

Supply chain visibility is a game changer, and there are a lot of players in the arean looking at ways to monetize it or integrate it into their existing set of processes. Here’s the thing: the entire concept is impossible without ubiquitous IT.

Question:

It is becoming cheaper to gather real-time information on the current state of any given component of a supply chain. What low-overhead game-changing uses for that information are yet to be realized? Where can you find “low hanging fruit” for your industry or application?

References:

[1] Rettig, C. (Fall 2007) “The Trouble with Enterprise Software” MITSloan Management Review Retrieved 2 October 2012 from http://www.lhstech.com/ISM/Articles/Rettig_Enterprise%20Software.pdf

[2] Infosys website accessed 2 October 2012: http://www.infosys.com/newsroom/press-releases/Pages/enhanced-SCV-collaboration-product.aspx