How to Achieve Supply Chain Collaboration Visibility
Optimize performance, control, and clarity from end to end.
Gaining full visibility over your supply chain helps you mitigate the effect of disruptions, conduct more effective risk management, and ensure you meet your regulatory obligations, yet only 6% of companies report having full visibility over their operations. Not having total oversight of the activities and actions of your suppliers and vendors makes it difficult to run your chain efficiently and can impact your bottom line, as well as leaving you open to reputational and legal issues.
But visibility is only part of the picture. For true connectivity, supply chain resilience, and innovation, you should seek to achieve supply chain collaboration visibility. This means that all parties can see what is happening and take proactive steps to address issues as a team. In today’s challenging global trade environment, this type of collaboration is essential.
A report says that 90% of supply professionals believe that there is an increased need to work in close partnership with suppliers to overcome the challenges of climate change, geopolitical issues, increased regulatory requirements, and other detrimental impacts.
This article explores supply chain collaboration visibility and provides tips on how to build a strategy to embrace this approach to logistics.
Key takeaways
- Supply chain collaboration visibility is all about you and your partners sharing insights and acting on them proactively.
What is supply chain collaboration visibility?
Supply chain collaborative visibility refers to the sharing of real-time insight into the activity and data of the entities within your supply chain management framework to support decision-making by all participants for the good of the supply chain. This allows for faster responses to supply chain disruptions or changes with a more coherent and coordinated approach.
- Visibility is the ability to track parts, products, and information as it moves through the supply chain. It is about knowing what is happening and where.
To put this into an example:
- Visibility: Your company is aware that a shipment containing components you need is delayed in Rotterdam.
Types of supply chain collaboration
There are different types of supply chain collaboration. They include:
- Strategic collaboration: Involving long-term partnerships that focus on shared goals and joint value creation. This might involve helping each other to meet sustainability targets or to work on joint ventures, such as developing new products together.
Some supplier management partnerships relate to more than one of these types of collaboration. They might also be vertical collaborations – those between partners at different levels of the chain, both upstream and downstream – or horizontal collaborations – between businesses at the same level, sharing resources, locations, or ideas for the benefit of each other. Full collaboration involves both horizontal and vertical partnerships.
Dimensions of supply chain visibility
There are many aspects to what equates to visibility in your supply chain management process. They include:
- End-to-end visibility: This means understanding who each entity is and what they do, from the raw material stage to the final delivery of the product. It is important to understand the processes that each partner has in place to ensure they work in an ethical and effective manner. For example, if you create chocolate products in the EU, you must make sure that the cocoa was not grown in a recently deforested area under the terms of the European Deforestation Regulation (EUDR). Only by having full visibility can you be sure of this. This is also referred to as visibility across tiers, because you look further than just your immediate suppliers; you look into their suppliers and their suppliers’ suppliers and so on.
Key enablers
Collaborative visibility relies on a range of factors that you can introduce into your supply relationship mapping efforts. They include:
Collaboration
- Trust between supply chain entities allows for a fruitful and transparent working relationship that makes it easier to get things done in an efficient manner.
Key enablers of visibility
- Integrated IT systems and data infrastructure give easy access to workflows as they are happening to understand where the inefficiencies might be or where there is non-compliant behaviour.
How to build a collaborative and visible supply chain strategy
Assess current maturity and pain points
Begin by evaluating the current state of your collaborative visibility efforts. Identify the gaps in your communication, data sharing, and partner engagement. Use maturity models and audits to highlight inefficiencies in your current processes and identify the areas of your chain that are prone to disruption.
Define collaboration and visibility goals
Establish clear objectives for your supply chain management that are aligned with your priority outcomes, such as reducing lead times, improving forecast accuracy, or increasing partner trust. Make sure you create goals that you can measure, sharing them across functions and offering explanations about them to ensure they buy into your strategy.
Select partners and technologies
Choose partners for your supply chain network who align with your values and who have the capabilities to work in an agile manner. Introduce a supply chain management solution that enables real-time data sharing and cross-tier visibility, such as Beebolt.
Pilot programmes and continuous improvement
Start with a pilot involving a few strategic partners to test how your collaboration workflows work and whether the visibility tools are calibrated correctly. Monitor your results, gather feedback, and refine the processes before scaling up. Create a culture of continuous improvement throughout the supply chain by carrying out regular audits.
Combined performance metrics to track success
Track these metrics in your supply chain management collaborative visibility processes to understand how successful your efforts are:
| Metric | Explanation |
| On-Time, In-Full (OTIF) delivery rate | Measures how often products are delivered on time and in full, reflecting both visibility into the movement of your goods and partner coordination for quality control. |
| Supply chain cycle time | Tracks the total time from order to delivery across the entire chain. Shorter cycles indicate better visibility and collaboration within your chain and a more efficient workflow thanks to collaboration. |
| Forecast accuracy across partners | Assesses how closely your shared forecasts align with actual demand, showing how well your collaboration processes can improve planning. |
| Supply chain agility index | Evaluates the speed and effectiveness of the supply chain’s response to disruptions or changes in demand. The more agile the process, the better your supply chain resilience is. |
| Perfect order rate | Combines key success factors like timely delivery, accurate documentation, correct quantity, and undamaged goods. This highlights overall your chain’s performance across visibility and collaboration touchpoints. |
FAQ
What’s the difference between visibility and transparency in supply chains?
Supply chain visibility refers to the ability to track goods, data, and processes across the chain in real time, while transparency involves the open sharing of that information with your partners. Collaborative visibility provides both of these approaches for enhanced digital collaboration.
How long does it take to see ROI from improved supply chain visibility?
ROI timelines vary depending on the complexity of the supply chain and technology you use, but many organisations begin seeing measurable benefits such as reduced lead time, improved inventory accuracy, or enhanced warehouse management procedures within six to 12 months of implementation of a collaborative visibility approach.
Conclusion
Supply chain collaboration visibility is a combination of impactful measures you can take to ensure you understand what is happening in your supply chain and that you are working together with your suppliers and other partners to create the most efficient and effective workflow possible. By using software solutions, you can capture and share supply chain analytics that help keep all parties aware of activity throughout the chain, allowing them to make proactive and impactful decisions to aid the productivity of your supply chain management. Beebolt is a collaborative, AI-powered supply chain operating system that allows for communication between all suppliers and the sharing of historical, real-time and predictive data. Explore all of Beebolt’s supplier portal features today with a seven-day trial that comes with absolutely no commitment. Sign up today.
