With the challenges that supply chains face today, managers realize that visibility is more important than ever, says Jerome Roberts, global vice president of marketing at Blume Global. After all, you can't react to what you can't see.

“You have to see in order to act, and to act in order to make an impact,” Roberts says. “So visibility has to be connected with execution, because that's ultimately the goal: to get the performance where you need it to be.”

Never has visibility been more important, he says. “What’s happened is we've gone from a state of somewhat predictable environments to completely unpredictable environments. Hence the focus on the visibility piece.”

Forecasting allows a company to plan, but the key in forecasting is consistency. “Without it, you need to have your eyes open and be able to react immediately because you're not able to work on the plan anymore. So the importance of visibility is increased because the forecasting is no longer reliable.”

Imagine the supply chain as a bunch of dots on a piece of paper, all connected by lines, he says. “Not only do you need information about the distance of those lines, you also need information about the dots. Call them supply chain nodes. Those are things like ocean ports, rail ramps, anywhere where your merchandise needs to stop, or the shipment needs to transition to the next leg in the journey. But what if there's congestion at the port that causes an additional week’s delay? If you don't know that, that's another opportunity for failure. Another opportunity for customers to be dissatisfied, for lost revenue, for higher costs, because now I have to pay all kinds of accessorials for that to be stored because I can't get it picked up.”

No matter the size of the company, visibility is key to success.