Oct 13, 2020 | 5 min read

Digital Industry Insight #36

End to End Visibility & The Future of Supply Chain - Part 3 of 3

For many businesses, the supply chain is not just the circulatory system, it's the heart and lungs of the business. The Great Pandemic of 2020 has exposed the vulnerabilities of supply chain disruption in stark terms, but even before the lockdowns and looking forward, the importance of maintaining flexibility and agility become even more critical for the future of supply chain.

Challenges of Increasing Complexity in the Supply Chain

As businesses become increasingly global in scope, supply chains become more complex and subject to greater risks. International supply chains face more economic, regulatory and market uncertainties than locally run businesses, and many operations are not supported by integrated technologies. Business networks also create more complexity with multiple enterprises looking to leverage partnerships that span different business processes and systems. It’s critical as networks become more complex that all participants be able to see “one view of the truth” with common, verifiable data that can be relied upon for transactions, payments, planning and customer communications.

 

Visibility to Scale

The economics of the supply chain are changing with increasing variability of timing, distance and quantity of shipments. The market is highly competitive, and global logistics providers need to be able to accommodate changing demands of customers while providing consistent shipping rates. From long-distance to same-day delivery, the challenges for providers is the same:  to provide customers with accurate delivery times, competitive rates and efficient services. Expectations continue to get higher as technology raises the bar for all participants with e-commerce behemoths like Amazon leading the way with vertically integrated logistics and tracking. Businesses are adopting the latest IoT technologies to provide accurate data around shipments and make them smart enough to adapt to changing conditions, for instance routing them to respond to changes on demand or avoid damage or spoilage.

 

Going End to End provides Essential Transparency

The key to an agile and flexible supply chain is visibility, and transparency is a major benefit from being able to track shipments from end to end. A survey from KPMG found that 70% of the companies surveyed perceive their supply chain as “very” or “extremely” complex, and providing transparency is key to generating stakeholder value.

The world is moving quickly to digital business, and it’s become an imperative for supply chain participants to embrace end to end visibility or risk being left behind. A recent Oxford Economics survey of 1,000 supply chain executives found that 49% of supply chain leaders (the top 12 % of respondents) can capture real-time data insights and act on them immediately, while 51% use AI and predictive analytics to capture insights. The survey found that in response to the coronavirus crisis: “While no supply chain can ever be fully prepared for and protected from global shocks of the magnitude created by the novel coronavirus, good visibility into all aspects of the supply chain, including suppliers and sub-suppliers, can build resilience and agility to lessen the impact of risk events."

 

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Digital Industry Impact

Intelligent Supply Chain

 

Please join Momenta for a very special webinar that explores how to anticipate disruption, and better prepare your supply chain to be resilient. 


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