Stop flying blind

The COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war snarled global supply chains, causing shortages of goods and materials around the world. These disruptions highlight a longstanding problem that most manufacturers and retailers haven’t been able to resolve: They can’t see deep into their supply chains to understand where the risks are.

And without that visibility, they are, in effect, “flying blind”.

Even in normal times, companies don’t have advance warning about issues like growing component shortages or labor disruptions. Without such visibility, companies risk being unable to fulfill their own customers’ orders, forcing them to find more reliable or cheaper suppliers, or worse, find themselves at the mercy of a supplier’s interruptions.

On the other hand, when companies do have visibility into their supply chains—from one end to the other—they gain the resiliency to better react and manage those disruptions and reduce risk. Wide-ranging visibility across the supply chain allows companies to better align demand and supply and improves their ability to make rapid, fact-based decisions with extended business partners. It clarifies the trade-offs needed to address supply chain constraints and enhances how the financial impacts of their decisions are made.

Companies have tried to develop the visibility they need. But a general resistance between companies and their suppliers to share information and the difficulty of getting all parties to understand the benefits of finding a solution have hampered these efforts.