Practically every business is – in one way or another – working to reduce supply chain costs. Be it operating costs, freight and logistics spend, buffer stock, or the countless other revenue leaks.

In the grand scheme of things, revenue growth and cost efficiency are quite complicated and a balancing act to master. The cheapest options are not always the best options; beneficial actions in one business unit may harm another; and optimizing within silos and is not really optimization.

As supply chain leaders work to recover revenues and drive customer loyalty, business growth, and competitive differentiation, it will be vital to invest in systems and processes that break down silos, better balance priorities, and optimize the supply chain end-to-end.

There have been countless times throughout my career where I was either a recommender or approver of significant IT projects. And, I must say, I have always experienced a prevailing attitude among senior management that these transformations are black holes and money pits.

I believe many (if not most) companies still feel this way. Why? There is a litany of cautionary tales: From Hershey’s widely reported $100 million failed ERP implementation in 2015 to our own personal stories. I’ve seen businesses engage consulting firms only to give up about six months in after slow progress and skyrocketing costs; I’ve witnessed first-hand how a $15 million project ballooned to $40 million before it was even finished.

Let’s talk about why this happens and what can be done about it.

The famous idiom “The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry” couldn’t be more appropriate these days. Supply chain management platforms deal with hypothetical and predictive constraints as part of their solve for uninterrupted results. But unexpected and exceptional events can trigger wildly adverse repercussions even with contingency baked into operational plans.

The Coronavirus – among other upsets, like tariffs – has supply chains scrambling for business network alternatives and “loophole engineering” (similar to what automakers have been doing for years). More than anything else, they’re grappling with the consequences of yesterday’s bad decisions. (It happens). While the focus now is to get things back on track in the short-term, businesses must also start acknowledging the new big picture. It’s time to adopt a platform that is more flexible and therefore resilient to today’s and tomorrow’s upsets.

Supply chain visibility has always been important. Yet, in 2017, improving end-to-end supply chain visibility only ranked 6th as a top objective, according to Geodis’ Supply Chain Worldwide Survey. It didn’t take long for practitioners to begin seeing the capability as a fundamental necessity and not just a tool that would be ‘nice to have.’ In fact, responders to Gartner’s latest SCM Technology User Wants and Needs Study named end-to-end visibility as their top funded initiative.

So, what’s suddenly motivating companies to prioritize this capability?

I recently joined IDC as an analyst covering global supply chain execution and fulfillment strategies, and began by reporting on the difference between maximization and optimization in the end-to-end supply chain: how it’s important to move from the former to the latter, how optimization can only be achieved by viewing the whole ecosystem, and how difficult this has been to do historically. It also explores how a digital transformation (DX) and the promise of interconnectivity and visibility it offers, as well as the intelligence it enables when paired with analytics or AI, make the optimization of large, multi-enterprise, multi-country, multi-industry business networks a viable – and necessary – goal.

Mention ‘supply chain Control Tower’ to anyone in the industry and they’ll nod in recognition. Ask anyone to define it and you’re likely to get a slightly different answer from nearly every person you ask. Why is that?

Software providers often latch the term onto different capabilities, depending on what sector or area of the supply chain they’re intending to address. Moreover, most control towers simply provide visibility and leave much to be desired about control, or actionability. They show users what’s going on (often in a limited scope of the supply chain) and if any corrective actions need to be taken, users tend to have to log in elsewhere to execute them. This also means that your corrective actions are only as good, timely, informed, and comprehensive as the system through which you’re mediating.

With all the technology being promoted, it’s incredibly challenging for companies to effectively weed through the noise and find a robust solution that will actually help with its full range of needs. Here’s a quick and practical guide to simplify the process.

The holiday season is a time of giving and receiving; UPS alone is anticipating delivering about 750 million packages. However, if you work in retail, it is also the unenviable time of mass returns and exchanges. According to the 2017 Consumer Returns in the Retail Industry report, “Total merchandise returns account for more than $351 billion in lost sales for US retailers.”

The modus operandi of the ‘sales process’ has changed over the years in both the B2B and B2C spheres; it has moved from being a largely offline to an online process and this transformation has also changed customer expectations vis-à-vis product delivery. 

The prospect of the two leading global economies, the United States and China, pushing beyond the trading of punitive tariffs and into a full-scale trade war is creating a lot of uncertainty. The potential fall out for organizations engaged in global trade could be disastrous. But the desire for managing supply chain disruption, reducing risk, and protecting future profits also creates the drive for improvement that will lead forward-thinking businesses to pursue real-time visibility and control over their supply chains. By adopting supply chain orchestration (SCO) global organizations may be able to reduce some of the uncertainties that comes with these tariffs.

Establishing maximum efficiency in your supply chain is vital in today’s customer-centric climate. The average consumer is only willing to wait a maximum of 4.5 days for delivery, down from 5.5 days in 2012, according to AlixPartners research. People spend time online researching products and identifying the best prices, but when they order, they expect things to arrive quickly, and to have visibility into its delivery status every step of the way.

The expectations of the average customer have changed a great deal in the last few years. People want products quickly and expect them to arrive in increasingly tight windows of time. Most businesses rely on a complex and disparate network of partners and software systems to fulfill their orders.

Agility has been a huge focus for organizations as we enter unpredictable waters of the current and future economy. Increasing customer expectations, global business challenges and digitization are greatly impacting how we market and sell our products and provide a high level customer experience through the supply chain. And agility is critical to sustained business success.

The definition of Supply chain visibility has evolved more than any other term in supply chain. From track and trace to multi-tier inventory, supply chain visibility is used to describe improvements in how we use data to track and make better decisions in our supply chain.

Today, we would like to talk about end-to-end supply chain visibility and how organizations are using supply chain orchestration in order to get real-time actionable visibility into the orders that are being executed throughout their end-to-end supply chains. This is key.

Last week, MPO and DSV co-presented on the webinar, "15 Critical Functions of Supply Chain Control Towers". As with every webinar we do we receive a whole host of insightful questions from the audience, many of which we answer on the webinar and the rest which we want to answer via our blog.

Here are the questions from the webinar and answers from our team of experts.

Digitization has changed everything. It’s changed not only how we interact but how we make decisions with readily available information. This accessibility to information and organizations has flattened the playing field for every organization as they look to market and sell their wares.