Abe Eshkenazi, chief executive officer of the Association for Supply Chain Management (ASCM), discusses the challenge of achieving true end-to-end visibility across global, multi-tier supply chains.

Eshkenazi identifies three major gaps in global supply chains in the post-pandemic era: visibility, transparency and traceability.

Many of the recent and most serious disruptions in supply chains occurred at the level of Tier 2 and beyond — suppliers over which organizations have never had full visibility. In the past three years, Eshkenazi says, companies have worked hard to identify all of the players in the supply chain. “A qualified supply chain professional can no longer walk into the C-suite and say, ‘I don’t know who and what is in my supply chain.’”

The effort revealed that many companies “maybe are not as resilient and sustainable as they believed they were.” They were hit hard by COVID-19, geopolitical strife, and attacks on shipping in the Red Sea.

To better prepare for future disruptions, companies need to align all of the partners in their supply chains, while understanding the relationship among them is not linear. “Today’s market is a more integrated digital network of partners, suppliers and other organizations in your supply chain,” Eshkenazi says. “Everybody’s interconnected now.”

Yet the resources and people needed to conduct that exercise are often lacking in small and medium-sized businesses, which make up the bulk of suppliers beyond Tier 1. Most importantly, they lack the level of talent required to unify the elements of modern-day supply chains.

Technology offers an answer, primarily in the form of digital supply chains, big data and analytics, and artificial intelligence. The “holy grail” is transformation that will enable access to timely, accurate and relevant information. But people are still key to fashioning a resilient modern-day supply chain with complete visibility, and they need to be equipped with a whole new set of skills to accomplish that end, Eshkenazi says.