Analyst Insight: Supply chain visibility means different things to different people. While the practice unquestionably has origins in “track and trace,” the benefits extend far beyond automated tracking. A good visibility platform should give you greater insight and control into past, present and future supply chain performance. But realizing the full potential of an investment in visibility comes down to the ability of businesses to adapt ways of working across their supply chains to capitalize on its potential.  

Visibility delivers a range of benefits, including workflow automation, risk reduction, improved customer service, reduced demurrage and detention costs and live inbound monitoring for warehouses. 

Realizing these benefits requires a focused change management effort, because technology is not, unfortunately, magic. It’s only as good as the processes you build around it. Existing ways of working need to be challenged in order to realize this value. A good starting point is to map out the processes that need to be started, stopped or adapted to gain the desired benefits.

The “start” bucket is typically made up of new workflows related to the configuration and regular operation of systems. This might take the form of logging in to check on your inbound freight every morning, or setting up shared tracking dashboards for each of your customers and warehouses.

The “stop” bucket contains old processes that have now been automated. Common examples include freight tracking and the e-mailing of tracking updates to stakeholders. Be careful to avoid forcing your new tech into old processes. If you’re generating a spreadsheet export of shipments that you e-mail to customers, you’re missing the point — you shouldn’t need the spreadsheet or the e-mail anymore.

Adapting is the hardest category of change to get right. With a lot of software platforms, the potential is huge, but initial implementation tends to focus on the most pressing problems, meaning secondary features are often forgotten about. To achieve the many transformational benefits of a good visibility infrastructure, it’s important to take the time to fully consider everything the tech can actually do (including how it can augment decision making), and develop a comprehensive implementation plan. 

It’s also important to recognize that the success of your visibility program depends, in part, on the other actors in your supply chain. For example, if you want to stop sending warehouses inbound freight spreadsheets and instead start using a real-time shared dashboard, you’ll need to convince warehouse teams of the value of the change. The key to overcoming this challenge lies in helping partners understand how the changes help them – for example, by explaining what they won’t have to do anymore.

The importance of change management is still consistently overlooked. Businesses too often invest in new software, expecting huge rewards for minimal effort. Getting users set up with login details isn’t adoption; it’s just the first step. Breaking habits and building new ones are the real objective, and this occurs over the course of weeks and months.  

Outlook: As visibility systems increasingly target the collaboration challenge within supply chains, their successful adoption will become easier. Rising demand for visibility, combined with a stronger focus on risk management, will cause a snowball effect through which we’ll start to see a more pronounced shift from analog to digitally enabled processes. 

Resource Link: www.beacon.com