We are in an Increasingly Outsourced World - How Do Companies Maintain Visibility and Control?

There is no question we are living in an increasingly outsourced supply chain world, across manufacturing, logistics, packing/packaging and more.

Supply Chain Digest Says... "We want to get a solid handle on where companies are at today in terms of supplier integration, and what the supply chain issues are from a lack of visibility," Gilmore added. What do you say? Click here to send us your comments Click here to see reader feedback

This is having a profound impact on the practice of supply chain, of course, and adding new risks as well as the new benefits.

The key challenge: how to maintain sufficient visibility and control in an increasingly outsourced supply chain world?

With this backdrop, SCDigest is launching an important new benchmark study on supplier integration. We ask readers to participate by completing a brief on-line survey, which can be found here: 2016 Supplier Integration Benchmark Survey.

All participants receive a complimentary summary of the survey results, and of course complete confidentiality of your responses is assured.

From the survey, we hope to answer such questions as:

• What levels of visibility and integration are really being achieved in outsourced supply chain processes?

• How do gaps and delays in supplier information flow impact operational performance and decision-making?

• How are companies achieving integration/visibility - and what are the top barriers to better visibility and control?

The survey results will be combined into a high quality report, which we expect to be available on early June from SCDigest.

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Notes SCDigest Editor Dan Gilmore: "There is a growing recognition in an era of dynamic demand changes that companies must have tighter integration with their suppliers, achieving real-time or near real-time visibility to supplier inventories, order status and more. But how do you get there? That is the question."

He notes that there is a new generation of tools, generally Cloud-based, that can eliminate most manual processes and significantly reduce latency in information flow from suppliers.

"We want to get a solid handle on where companies are at today in terms of supplier integration, and what the supply chain issues are from a lack of visibility," Gilmore added. "We encourage companies to participate in this imporant research."

Again, the brief survey is available here:2016 Supplier Integration Benchmark Survey.

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