Supply Chain Visibility
What is Supply Chain Visibility?
Supply chain visibility is the ability to track every part of the supply chain journey. Modern-day supply chains are extremely complex and difficult to track, with a diverse supplier network around the world. Supply chain visibility is critical for logistics professionals, freight forwarders, and any organization that needs to track their products or containers throughout the supply chain journey. Supply chain visibility collects and presents the real-time location and status of various assets throughout the supply chain, from points A-B.
More than 90% of shipments pass through the ocean. Often, the ocean portion accounts for 50 percent of transportation time, so delays significantly impact the overall estimated time of arrival (ETA). Ocean transportation can become complicated and unpredictable, with occurrences such as transhipments and rollovers.
Digital Supply Chain Challenges
Gartner surveyed more than 500 supply chain professionals to better understand the digital and technological challenges facing the supply chain:
- Only 38% of organizations are improving supply chain technology to support end-to-end processes
- 50% of supply chain organizations will have invested in artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics by the year 2024
Supply chain visibility is a critical part of supply chain digital transformation, and it is important that supply chain professionals are able to track their logistics throughout the supply chain journey. Implementing digital supply chain visibility will drive growth, mitigate risk, and optimize costs. A 360-degree view of the supply change is extremely important and without it, your supply chain-related activities will be at risk of being disorganized, expensive, and inefficient.
Four Tips to Improve Your Supply Chain Visibility
- Status check – understand the pain points and gaps in your supply chain, to constantly improve. For example, lowering operational costs, or diminished customer experience
- Set future goals – after reviewing your supply chain status, it will be easier to understand which goals you need to achieve. For example, these goals could involve enhancing customer experience, or improving operations. It is also important to set deadlines for these goals
- Invest in solutions – after understanding your goals, it is important to evaluate and then find the right solution that will help you improve your supply chain visibility. The optimal solution will add value, helping to mitigate risk and reduce costs
- Measure your performance – this is critical to constantly improve your business and ensure you achieve the goals that you’ve set
Supply Chain Visibility — an Asset for your Business
Supply chain visibility is critical for everyone involved in the product journey to know the ocean freight container’s estimated time of arrival (ETA), as this has a knock-on effect throughout the supply chain. Receiving real-time data about the logistics of your supply chain and ensuring supply chain visibility will have a positive effect on your company’s bottom line. You can:
- Reduce costs
- Increase customer satisfaction
- Provide real-time insights into what’s happening with the supply chain
- Mitigate risks
- Uncover the weak spots in the supply chain
- Reduce reputational damage and costs
The Importance of Real-Time Supply Chain Visibility
Real-time supply chain visibility is being able to see, in real-time, the location and status of your ocean freight container, or cargo. Windward’s Ocean Freight Visibility solution utilizes unique, proprietary artificial intelligence models that have helped us understand and predict vessel behavior for over a decade. It fuses data from a multitude of sources that are relevant to the supply chain and applies advanced algorithms, creating a more accurate and reliable source of truth for ETA predictions and enabling real-time visibility on container journeys.
