How important is end-to-end supply chain transparency for the industry?

Transparency, resilience and sustainability of the supply chain are priorities that can’t be ignored. The pandemic highlighted the obvious dangers to any business with a supply chain that cannot operate in a crisis. But resilience also comes with huge benefits for companies that are able to continue serving their customers and to meet their increasingly changeable demands. Similarly, companies that lack sustainability and transparency can find their products penalized by regulators and scorned by customers, while companies that can point to sustainable practices and products are rewarded.

What is the best strategy for organisations to achieve end to end supply chain transparency?

To achieve transparency, companies are adopting so-called “control towers,” with an ultimate goal of creating resilient, self-healing supply chains and seamless collaboration among the players along the chain. Technical sophistication ranges widely today:

• Some control towers provide real-time data across the full supply chain and can predict suboptimal events or disruptions.
• Many focus on limited portions of the supply chain, with batched data and less ability to predict.
• None yet have the deep transparency that industry-wide data standards and sharing would make possible. But we predict that day is not far off.