Hot on the heels of the pandemic, which caused
many businesses to re-think their supply chain
WHY END-TO-END SUPPLY
CHAIN VISIBILITY SHOULD BE
IN YOUR SIGHTS
Maximize control with end-to-end supply chain visibility
DHL Supply Chain – Excellence. Simply delivered.
strategies, geopolitical turmoil has dealt another
blow to keep supply chain professionals on their
toes. The need for visibility right across the supply
chain has never been greater, as companies seek
to find competitive advantage in this new
business landscape.
Three factors in particular are putting pressure on
the supply chain today, requiring an enhanced level
of visibility.
1. The growth of e-commerce
The growth of e-commerce is stretching supply
chains and providing not just geographical, but wider
challenges in terms of culture, language and
expectations. Some of these online businesses have
low market maturity and work with a high number of
suppliers. This causes issues with data consistency
and handling the huge volume of data demands a
resilient, transparent infrastructure.
Retail e-commerce sales worldwide from 2014 to 2025
(in billion U.S. dollars)
9000
8000
7000
Sales in billion U.S. dollars
6000
5000
4000
3000
2000
1,336
1,548
1000
0
2014 2015
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/379046/
worldwide-retail-e-commerce-sales/
2. Product integrity
The Covid vaccine has put a spotlight on cold chain
storage and distribution. How do you keep a
continuous watch on the condition and temperature of
sensitive goods to preserve their condition and have
the data instantly accessible to those who need it?
3. Sustainability
There is a growing requirement for measuring and
minimizing the carbon footprint of a supply chain.
The more links in the chain, the more complex it is to
measure emissions. Full transparency becomes
essential, especially when it comes to meeting CO2
commitments and legislation.
If you can see it, you can control it
You’ll notice there’s a common thread running
through all of the above challenges: the need for
greater visibility within the supply chain. It’s vital that
organizations have a clear view of all the activities
upstream and downstream, in real time (or near-real
time), if they are to retain control of their business.
This calls for a collaborative approach between
suppliers, service providers and customers. Only then
is it possible to anticipate supply chain disruption and
put in place measures to mitigate potential problems.
If you’re pre-warned that parts won’t arrive on time,
or a customer order won’t be fulfilled, you can do
something about it faster.
7,391
6,767
The most important aspect of collaboration is that
6,151
everyone has visibility of the same data –resulting in
5,542
4,938
4,248
better customer service throughout the supply chain.
3,351
2,982
Businesses can make faster decisions about inventory
2,382
1,845
management, manufacturing or production and make
adjustments to deal with the unexpected. They can
2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022* 2023* 2024* 2025* operate more efficiently without wasting time or
© Statista 2022
suffering unnecessary costs, or loss of business.
Why is end-to-end visibility so hard to achieve?
Most supply chains are built up over years, if not
decades. In the process, different management
systems are put in place for different business
functions, for instance customer service,
transportation and warehousing. To make things even more
complicated, some organizations still have an array of local,
manual processes.
The trouble is, to achieve end-to-end visibility, you need those
systems to talk to each other, and very often they can’t. When
data isn’t shared it can’t be collated in one place and the chances
of losing some of it, such as emails or delivery notes, is high.
Even when new systems are put in place today, they are often
operated by vendors that specialize in one subject area, such
as a particular mode of transport or industry sector. Again,
they often struggle to communicate with each other.
This approach, though logical at the time each element was
put in place, can cause major headaches. For example, many
companies find the sheer number of logins and passwords
makes life difficult, if not impossible, when they need to
access multiple systems to attempt to marry up different
sources of data.
Escalating consumer expectations is the key challenge for
businesses that serve both the B2B and B2C markets. This
concern focuses around the pressure to deliver excellent
customer service – e.g. ease and convenience of ordering
and tracking shipments, and near-instant service.
Source: Extract from DHL Supply Chain white paper: The E-Commerce Supply Chain:
Overcoming Growing Pains available here.
With greater visibility comes greater clarity
In today’s evolving landscape where new business models are
continuously created, it’s important to be agile and to quickly
adapt to ever-changing circumstances.
End-to-end visibility through the supply chain means you can
have greater clarity about what’s happening in real time (or
near-real time), giving you the information you need so you
can make decisions and respond fast.
You can learn whether suppliers are on time or late. You can
discover kinks or bottlenecks in the supply chain. You can
make improvements and cut costs to become more efficient.
A single visibility platform also allows you to gather data
driven insights across your entire supply chain. These can give
you the comprehensive analytics you need to spot hidden
opportunities for future business growth.
Track and trace used to be just a B2C proposition, but now
B2B customers are demanding this as well. They are the ones
trying to answer their own customers’ questions – “When will
my parcel be delivered”, “Why wasn’t my parcel delivered”.
Consumers are demanding more accurate tracking so they
A recent FourKites industry survey on the state of the
pharma supply chain explored the current lack of visibility
and the accelerated industry need for predictability and
control across the pharma supply chain — confirming that
these issues are more important than ever before for
pharma manufacturers.
Biggest pain point in transporting/storing goods
Nearly a third of the executives surveyed identified product protection as their most
demanding storage and transportation challenge.
32% 25% 23%
Product protection Supply/demand Operating costs
and need to fluctuations and penalties
quarantine (e.g. retailer fines
for consumer OTC)
Source: https://www.pharmamanufacturing.com/articles/2022/
closing-the-supply-chain-visibility-gap/
can plan deliveries around their day, rather than the other
way around.
Harnessing an integrated solution provides further
opportunities to leverage data science and ultimately ensure
the right decisions are made at the right time in a predictive
manner. This can result in a continuously improving supply
chain, reducing the product time-to-market by speeding up
the process flows.
In short, a visibility solution is your eyes and ears, anticipating
where you could have a problem, not where you have had one.
Where to start
An integrated end-to-end visibility system should give you a
seamless digital experience, where the variety and velocity
of the data doesn’t hinder performance. It must be a
secure resilient platform that can roll with the punches of
business disruption.
The fact is that those supply chains most in need of this type
of platform are the most complex, with a myriad of different
data sources. Collating this data may seem like such a
daunting task that there will always be a reason to leave it
until tomorrow. The trouble with that is other businesses may
be quicker off the mark, giving them a head start to visibility
and a major competitive advantage.
End-to-end visibility may not be the silver bullet for all your
supply chain challenges. However, it is undeniably the way
many organizations are heading and can provide benefits
20% right down the line, from sourcing materials to product
delivery. It’s certainly worth a closer look.
At DHL, we saw the need to create a single customer digital
experience portal to provide a high level of visibility. From one
entry point our customers can access all their different
Freight traceability
business functions, ranging from Track & Trace, reporting &
analytics, customer services and many more. Discover more
about MySupplyChain.