Global Supply Chain Visibility In A World Gone Flat

Many companies still do not have timely visibility into the critical processes involved in global supply chain management, despite the heightened attention to this area in recent years. This often prevents companies from accessing information quickly enough to be able to use it for decision making. Companies that do track enough milestones often suffer from poor data quality and factual inaccuracies in forecasts and reports. For those that track the key supply chain events and have advanced visibility strategies to support supply chain decision-making, it is critical not to overwhelm internal stakeholders with information but to instead provide them with the tools to extract the best possible intelligence from the data they have – while keeping the amounts of data manageable. Companies must move from merely tracking their supply chain events to performing advanced analysis in order to drive profound changes in their supply chains.

To determine the Best-in-Class (BIC) companies in this study, survey respondents were evaluated based on their performance in each of the following metrics:

• Perfect orders delivered to international customers (91% complete and on-time)
• Perfect orders received from international suppliers (88% complete and on-time)
• Total landed costs (74% reported a decrease)
• Lead time variability from international locations (66% reported a decrease)