Supply Chain Visibility: More Trust than Technology

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the November 2012 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

November 2012

We’ve all heard about the advantage of being a preferred customer to your buyers. Now we learn that it’s just as important to become a good customer to your key suppliers. This article explains the benefits of becoming a preferred customer and lays out the actions needed to become one.

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If there’s one recurring bad dream that keeps supply chain executives awake at night, it might well be the seemingly impossible quest for better visibility. It’s one of those classic nightmares where you keep grasping for something just out of reach. Even at companies with higher levels of collaboration in their supply chain, it seems that visibility is always “two years off.”

The popular misconception that information technology is the underlying issue limiting data availability—and the resultant visibility—has prompted executives to seek solutions in IT. Given the sizable investments companies have made in IT to harvest supply chain data, the question of why visibility isn’t better is a perplexing one. The “complete” view of inbound supply and outbound fulfillment sustained by seamless upstream and downstream connectivity that managers had been led to expect is proving to be a frustrating, ongoing work in progress. There’s no shortage of technology solutions that purport to enable visibility. Yet getting timely, accurate information with which to run global operations—even after costly IT solutions are in place—remains a daunting challenge.

So if technology is not the bottleneck, then what is? The answer is that the nature of relationships is the primary constraint on what and how much information ultimately gets shared. The more trusting and collaborative the relationship, the more that data is shared and visibility improves; the less trusting and collaborative, the opposite holds true.

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