Supply-Chain-Visibility

What is Supply Chain Visibility?

The practice of collecting, storing and analyzing the relevant data to track the flow of materials as they move through the supply chain from suppliers to producers to the end-consumers.

Why optimize Supply Chain Visibility?

Supply Chain visibility enables more control and management of the supply chain by making data readily available to all stakeholders, including the customer. Supply chain visibility technology enables a quick response to any event by allowing users to take action and reshape demand or redirect supply.

How to optimize Supply Chain Visibility?

Supply Chain Visibility first emerged as hot topic in the late ninetees under the name of Supply Chain Event Management (SCEM). The main reason it did not live up to its expectations was that the focus was on the measure, monitor and notify aspects, and not enough on the control and management of the signals. This requires such systems to be integrated parts of the planning systems.

As a result, SCEM solutions were little more than alerting mechanisms overwhelming users with hundreds of messages, but no mechanism to evaluate the resulting impact of the event on the wider supply chain, nor identifying the right people that should be notified about such impacts, and very importantly, no way to generate actionable responses to the events.

Supply Chain Visibility has recently reemerged as an important concept, but now included additional elements to address the shortcoming of SCEM, namely, the ability to determine an appropriate response to an event once notified of it. Gartner calls this Intelligent Business Operations (IBO).

Supply chain visibility must be applied in a wider context of strategic, tactical and operational planning, not only in execution. Constraint Based Optimization (CBO) and Simulation capabilities should be included as core requirements to determine an appropriate response to an event.

What are the results of optimizing Supply Chain Visibility?

Optimizing visibility in the supply chain with ORTEC results in:

• Improved on-time delivery
• Reduced working capital and manage variable costs more effectively
• Updated customers of product availability and shipment status
• Tracked and traced products throughout the entire supply chain
• Improved decision making

Why contact ORTEC?

ORTEC is a leading supplier in Supply Chain Optimization solutions. Their solutions provide all kind of visibility and transparency functionality, as described in their white paper on Supply Chain Control Tower. They also have a large consulting team supporting continuous business improvement programs at their customers. References can be found at all their industries, showing strong business improvements.