Increasingly, companies are discovering competitive advantage by gaining visibility over events in their supply chain. Supply chain visibility is the ability to "see" every move, transaction, and event that takes place—from the sourcing of raw materials from suppliers to delivery of the finished product to the final customer. "As customer requirements increase and life cycles and delivery cycles decrease, enterprises need to find better ways to manage their supply chains," explains Karen Peterson, research director for the Gartner Group (www.gartner.com). Enhanced visibility, Peterson adds, enables companies to gain a clearer understanding of what is occurring in the supply chain and be able to react more quickly to those events.

The concept of supply chain visibility emerged about two years ago, according to Michael Bittner, research director, supply chain strategies and e-logistics for AMR Research (www.amrresearch.com). "Its growth has been facilitated by the Internet," Bittner observes, "a perfect vehicle for providing supply chain information."

A number of solutions now exist to help companies gain supply chain visibility. In evaluating those options, one of the first considerations that must be addressed is the scope of the solutions. While some providers offer end-to-end visibility solutions others specialize in selected segments of the supply chain process, such as supplier-to-manufacturer, manufacturer-to-customer, or distributor-to-customer.

An example of a provider offering broad supply chain visibility is Promatis Corp (www.promatis.com). "When we developed our products, we considered offering them separately," says Maria Miller, vice president, worldwide product marketing. But since the products were so integrated, Promatis elected to present them as one. "However, clients can select the specific segments they want, or we can help them select these segments," Miller explains.

Another provider with a comprehensive system is PeopleSoft (www.peoplesoft.com). The company's "enterprise portal technology" encompasses a customer portal for customer-manufacturer interactions, an employee portal for internal interactions, and a supplier portal for manufacturer-supplier interactions. Users can log into several applications, including: customer relationship management to make inquiries on customer activities; order management to inquire on specific orders customers have placed; inventory and order shipment to make sure inventory has been assigned and is ready to be shipped; and production management to check the status of work orders. "The system can be tailored to provide only the information the user wants," explains Michael Peterson, PeopleSoft's manager of product strategy.

Demand Management (www.demandsolutions.com) also provides end-to-end visibility solutions to enhance supply chain planning. "We begin with historical data, such as customer orders, production schedules, and on-hand inventories," explains Michael Campbell, the company's president and CEO. The system then creates a plan for all segments in the supply chain, as far back as raw material suppliers and all the way to final customers, if users want this breadth of coverage. "The system can generate a complete supply chain replenishment plan daily, weekly or monthly," Campbell adds.

In December 2001, Demand Management plans to introduce a Web-enabled, Java-driven version of its software that is platform independent.

More specialized solutions are available as well. HighJump Software (www.highjumpsoftware.com), for example, focuses on tactical visibility. HighJump's "Advantage Dashboard" provides visibility over activities taking place within the user's organization. Another product, "Customer Service Advantage," provides this same capability to customers. HighJump has adopted an interesting pricing approach to its supply chain execution software—a "guaranteed fixed prices" program on a number of the offerings.

Supply chain visibility allows you to observe and act upon events taking place throughout the supply chain. In essence, you can "check in" any time you want to see what is taking place. Experts agree that the real value of visibility solutions is that they alert you to problems that have taken place—or may take place—so that you can proactively address them. Examples of alerts include: "This is the last item in inventory." "Capacity has been reached in production." "This shipment has been delayed in transit." "This shipment has been rejected by the customer for quality reasons."

A comprehensive event management feature of any supply chain solution should have four elements, according to AMR's Bittner. The first is monitoring. You expect a shipment to be picked up by a carrier at a certain time and delivered to an end point. Did that happen? The second is notifying. While some users want to be notified when all events take place as expected, others only want to be notified of certain unplanned events taking place (inventory outages, shipment delays, and so forth). The third is simulating and controlling, which Bittner believes is the toughest capability to develop. Given that this event did not take place as planned, the user should be able to simulate and control an intelligent response. The final element is measuring. This is the long-term process of assessing how well suppliers, carriers, and other players are performing.

Vigilance, Inc. (www.vigilance.com) says that it offers a comprehensive event management product, a main feature of which is detection. "The system watches for you 24/7 in real time across a global supply chain," explains company CEO and founder Jonathan Golovin. The system allows you to set up the criteria for when you want to be alerted, such as: "Tell me when an order does not come in on time." "Tell me when it comes in, but with the wrong quantity."

EXE Technologies (www.exe.com), which specializes in supply chain solutions for the retail channel, offers an "intelligent" event management feature. "If something goes wrong, the system not only notifies you, but provides you with all relevant information," states Bruce Welty, senior vice president of industry marketing. If the solution is deemed easy enough, the system can be pre-programmed to automatically make decisions for you. If solutions are more difficult, it defers to the user to make the decisions.

Finally, a product called ActiveTrac, offered by CoSite (www.cosite.com), allows users to control inventory and other physical assets at the item level. The system pulls information from the item (box or part) and provides this "daily operational information" to users on a real-time basis, allowing them to provide detailed information to customers. "If a customer wants to know where his order is, you usually have to say that it was shipped two days ago and should be delivered in one or two more days," explains Glenn Riser, vice president of operations. With ActiveTrac, he says, users can pinpoint the shipment's exact location and tell the customer when it should be delivered to within an hour or two.

Some companies have carved out a special niche in the emerging supply chain visibility space. Peregrine Systems (www.peregrine.com), for example, offers three applications. One involves working with a provider called Supply Solutions to offer supply chain visibility and replenishment. The second involves a relationship with another provider, Tilion (www.tilion.com), a company specializing in supply chain event management. This offering, called "supply chain analytics," provides event management alerts. "If you order 1,000 widgets," explains company marketing executive Peter Yost, "the system will alert you if your supplier only sends you 500, so you can begin the process of finding another 500." The third involves working with Exchange Bridge, which focuses on order management in the consumer goods package industry.

Another provider that has carved out a special niche is Extreme Logic (www.extremelogic.com), which specializes in tying together different systems to enhance supply chain visibility. "Our architecture allows customers to tie in, in real time, the whole process involved in a production order or facility order," explains Keith Landers, chief technical officer. The Extreme Logic solution can manage this process over a multiple-plant scenario, providing real-time status, real-time updates, and real-time knowledge about where a given product will be shipped. "It can also share this information with customers," Landers adds, "allowing users to get closer to real-time supply chain ordering."

The supply chain leaders in their respective industries have demonstrated beyond any doubt that supply chain visibility can deliver tremendous competitive advantage. Carefully selecting the solutions that give you that visibility is the first step in gaining that edge.