Challenges In Achieving Supply Chain Visibility

I spoke to 100+ VPs and Directors of Supply Chain and procurement during the summer. Here are some key learnings: Data dilemma: Data is abundant, yet siloed and trapped across the supply chain. Supply chain teams have a plethora of tools, many built from the 1990s to 2010s with the inefficient design of machines depending on humans for data entry. This causes bottlenecks, leads to errors, and is often "solved" by increasing team size - compounding the complexity supply chain leaders already face. Efforts to create standard data-sharing methods exist, but rarely stick given the ever-expanding network of supply chain participants. EDIs, supplier portals, and templates become masking-tape solutions, adding complexity to the problem they're trying to solve. When many suppliers don't adopt these solutions, they become yet another siloed data source. Cost of fragmentation: Having data trapped and siloed undermines one of supply chain leaders' most important goals: visibility. This lack of visibility adds to the "fog of war" a supply chain leader faces, taking away leverage to optimize costs and decrease lead times. Among many risks across the supply chain, lack of visibility, is an obvious one that can be controlled. Faster horse or horseless carriage: Current solutions are viewed through the lens of existing technology. The Innovator's Dilemma taught us how technologies behave in S-shapes; as tech gets cheaper, new applications emerge. Few supply chain teams are aware of what generative AI can do to help them. As the cost of intelligence decreases, new applications are arising that will allow supply chain teams to solve these problems and do things they couldn't have imagined. At Mentum, we're working with our first customers to reimagine solutions that address these challenges. Interested in learning more about our learnings? Send me a message!

Article I wrote for Forbes: Supply Chain Visibility: Only Possible With Supplier Collaboration. Meet Becky the Buyer. She’s a stone-cold procurement expert, & she’s an incredibly hard worker. Becky focuses a lot of her time communicating with suppliers, doing everything she can to stay in the know about orders, line changes and shipments. Becky rules. When Becky’s information is accurate, forecasting, demand planning and inventory planning are much easier and much more accurate. When her information is outdated or erroneous, issues arise quickly. Unfortunately, most of the time, it’s outdated or erroneous. At the root of Becky’s problem is a lack of true visibility across the supply chain. She and her team don’t have it because they rely on email & spreadsheets to communicate with suppliers and collect the information they need. Emails & spreadsheets?! 2010 called and they want their manual processes back. Disruptions are more common than ever, so you as a supply chain leader must be able to ascertain the problem, develop a solution and pivot quickly to mitigate risk and protect cash flow. If a shipment is going to be late or partial, you need to know immediately—not in a day or two when the email is found in a cluttered inbox (or worse, when the shipment arrives on the dock). I interview supply chain leaders every day who experience many of these same challenges. Their buyers are overloaded with clerical work, the process is slow and error-prone and they don’t really know the full story of what’s going on across the supply chain. Of course, there’s a solution to all this madness, and technology provides it. Modern supplier collaboration solutions bring buyers together with their suppliers in software that consolidates communication and automates the PO workflow from beginning to end. Instead of hoping to catch an email in a stack of emails, Becky’s team is notified the instant a message is sent. All communication happens within the context of specific POs, so everyone is always on the same page. At any moment of the day, Becky can see exactly what’s happening with an order—every last update, line change & acknowledgment. All of this information is written directly into the ERP, which eliminates the need for error-prone manual entry & guarantees the data is much more accurate. Now, demand planning and inventory planning are more accurate and forecast adjustments can be made quickly when new information is available. This exchange of information between buyers and suppliers is true collaboration. Without that seamless connection, there is no complete visibility and everything downstream is affected. A collaboration solution can provide real-time supplier scorecards so you can monitor on-time delivery, responsiveness and other critical key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be tailored to specific suppliers. We call this mutual accountability. 👉👉Full article: bit.ly/3qMYHe4

70% of Companies Can’t See Past Their Tier 1 Suppliers Despite all the efforts to collect data, build dashboards, and compile reports, most companies are STILL struggling to get the sub-tier visibility they need for effective SCRM. Why? Because the data they’re relying on is: - Disorganized: siloed across tools and departments - Dirty: outdated or inaccurate from legacy systems or manual collection - Disconnected: no clear link between suppliers, site locations, and components Companies know they need visibility. But they can’t trust the data they do have to build effective SCRM strategies. That leaves them vulnerable when disruptions occur. When we work with our customers at Z2Data, we emphasize that visibility isn’t just about getting data from suppliers. It’s about internal data too — and having a strategy that connects parts, suppliers, and locations in real time. #SCRM #visibility #supplychain #supplychainrisk #supplierdata #subtiervisibility