Take this test. Think of a typical product or inventory item in your supply chain today.  Or, think of a shipment, or, if it’s easier, think of an order.  Now, ask yourself:  Can I locate the exact status and details of that product, shipment or order right now?  If you feel you can identify the status and details, can you do it in less than seven seconds? 

If you did not answer yes to both of these questions, you do not have, in today’s technology terms, global supply chain visibility. You may have the ability to see parts of your supply chain using your internal systems – like the details of a purchase order, or the ETA on a shipment that just left Xiamen, China. And you may feel that the information you don’t have you can get by going to the Web site of your forwarder or your carrier. But until you have a single platform capable of collecting and standardizing all your supply chain information so it’s accessible and accurate 99% of the time, you won’t have enough visibility to truly transform your operations – to make a real difference. You are what managers now refer to as “supply-chain blind.” 

Companies routinely have data quality levels in the 50-60% for their visibility tools. That simply won’t cut it. Imagine if four out of every ten times you used Google, you got an error page. You would stop using Google!  No wonder so few companies have been able to drive adoption within their own ranks using a single software system.  If the information isn’t there, or is wrong, it won’t work – no matter how good the software is.  For a visibility system to deliver significant value for a company, thousands of users must be on the system every day, relying on it to make critical decisions and driving change. If people can’t trust the system to deliver accurate, complete and timely information every time, they simply won’t use it.

In short, the issue here is not a software problem. It’s an information problem. And a great deal of the information we are talking about comes not from a company’s own operations and workforce, but from beyond the four walls.  

Despite massive investments, even the world’s biggest companies have struggled to build the networks necessary to get their data in one place, in one standard format, with high levels of data accuracy.

The answer lies in the global reach and availability of the Internet. There is a lot of new terminology and jargon floating around today to describe Internet-based business software.  You might have heard of “Software as a Service” (SaaS), or “on-demand," or  “cloud computing."  These terms describe a completely different way of delivering software to companies. The software is delivered without the hassle and costs associated with traditional IT deployments.  Your software vendor develops, hosts, operates and maintains the entire solution footprint for you, in the “cloud," at a fraction of the cost it would normally take for traditional “license and install” systems. 

In the world of global supply chain visibility, the SaaS model has caught on, certainly, but the true innovation takes the model one step further.  No longer is it just the software that is delivered “on demand,” but rather the entire network of electronically-integrated external partners, effectively constituting a single, global, On-Demand partner Network.  Not unlike the power grid utility whose cost is amortized across a broad community of consumers, so too does this On-Demand Network platform play the role of a single, low-cost industry utility, giving thousands of companies a single, ultra-convenient network of common, industry-wide partner integrations and data standards. While the cost of building and maintaining this network is beyond the means of any one company, when it is built and run by a neutral third party, the cost is spread across all users, making it attainable at a fraction of the cost of building it from scratch.

The Web-based approach to visibility is working. At my company alone, we have customers like Sears, Caterpillar, Liz Claiborne, Xerox, Del Monte, Williams Sonoma and Wyeth sharing a single network and getting the ability to locate information in seconds – not hours, not days, not weeks. For these companies, and others like them, the single On-Demand platform becomes a global control tower, allowing them to see and to monitor their supply chains better than ever before.  These companies pass the “7 second” test – which means they are far more likely to make better decisions and operate more efficiently than their peers. 

With a visibility platform in place and running, the value potential expands quickly. While most think of tactical track and trace, or “where’s my stuff?” functionality, leaders are doing things like:

• Planning labor and cross docking at DCs or terminals by seeing “upstream” to what’s headed inbound;
• Moving from letters of credit to open account financing by providing banks with documents and supply chain event information in real time;
• Using visibility information to lessen reliance on expensive airfreight, and treating ocean containers as moving, virtual warehouses; and
• Responding quickly to seasonal and/or regional spikes in demand by quickly locating and diverting in-transit shipments.