Analyst Insight: The Brookings Institution noted in a recent paper that supply chain resilience is downstream of supply chain visibility. In the thick of the pandemic in 2021, McKinsey reported that visibility was the top investment priority for companies. While supply chain professionals have always depended on technology, many tech stacks remain “archipelagos,” disconnected islands of information that do not allow for connected insights. New technologies provide an opportunity for the supply chain to connect its various silos of operation and increase visibility industry-wide.  

The supply chain has been slow to embrace the full potential of digital technology. The recent supply chain crisis provoked some movement in the direction of digitization, but legacy processes have overall been slow to evolve or adapt.  

While a handful of companies have made greater investments in their tech portfolio, few are taking full advantage of what technology can offer. This pace of adoption will negatively affect their competitive advantage due to a lack of visibility and access to data. 

Trade documentation is one potent example. Bills of lading remain physical pieces of paper — susceptible to loss, misreading and other inefficiencies. Despite efforts by groups such as the Digital LTL Council to promote an electronic bill of lading, the uptake remains modest. The persistence of paper documentation represents how visibility remains locked in these manual processes.  

Intelligent Systems Create Visibility

Technology is trending less toward solving a particular problem and more toward the development of systems and platforms that allow professionals to maintain broad oversight of their operations as a whole. The advent of transportation management systems (TMSs) and their adoption over the past several years are characteristic of this trend. A value-added, multi-model logistics provider with a strong TMS can orchestrate distinct and often disconnected operations and processes of supply chain companies into one platform to meet the growing complexities in the supply chain. 

This consolidating power — perhaps the main under-exploited asset of the latest wave of tech in the supply chain — allows companies to take full stock of their businesses, providing penetrating visibility into everything from shipping options to compliance. Despite this utility and the abundance of well-built TMSs, the rate of adoption is slower than tech optimists might want. The inertia associated with legacy processes remains strong, and only about 37 % of logistics businesses are using a TMS.  

AI on the Horizon

Artificial intelligence (AI), of course, is on the horizon of technological possibilities for supply chain visibility. Like a TMS, a good part of AI’s potential lies in its ability to consolidate — vectorizing full corpora of unstructured company data and allowing for plain-English queries to return instant and accurate answers. Its generative capabilities are even more superlative, allowing companies to not just gain greater visibility, but also model and predict scenarios, and automate and execute processes, driving toward improved profitability. In terms of visibility, AI is not simply a crow’s nest, it’s a crystal ball.  

Outlook: The latest wave of technology can consolidate disparate data sets to tell a single story about a company and its place in the industry. This removes opacity from the supply chain and allows for insight and powerful reporting. The only thing standing in the way is inertia. If the pandemic alone was not enough to do away with complacency, then it may simply be a matter of time.  As more companies begin to flex their competitive advantage by leveraging the visibility these tools afford, it won’t be long before everybody has to adapt, if only as a matter of survival.  

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