Abstract
The benefits of Supply Chain Visibility (SCV) have been known for over a decade. Supply Chain Visibility can be accomplished through data visualization, referred to as supply chain dashboards in this paper. Organizations have been deploying Supply Chain Visibility solutions in their environment to reduce costs and improve services but often remain dissatisfied as the existing solutions fail to deliver in today’s highly dynamic business environment. As a result Supply Chain Visibility projects to support agile supply networks are at high risk for failure. Achieving Supply Change Visibility excellence has become a major concern for supply chain leaders. Some of the major challenges faced by supply chain companies among others are:
• Collapsing demand, unreliable forecasts
• Increasing complexity of global sourcing and aggressive global competition leading to longer lead times and more pipeline inventory; and
• The immediate need to control downstream and upstream logistics
To address the above-mentioned challenges organizations need a dynamic and robust SCV framework that can enable quick response to change as well as improve and strengthen the organizational supply chain by making data readily available at a glance to all stakeholders, including the customer. The need for Supply Chain Visibility framework is especially great for manufacturing companies who are moving from a push supply chain model to a demand-driven supply chain model.
This paper presents a generic concept of developing a supply chain dashboard coupled with practical case studies. The concept is developed based on a methodology for mapping, modeling, analyzing and redesigning the value chains for extended enterprise, the control and monitoring model. The supply chain dashboard supports the monitoring, analysis, control and management of the supply chain performance. It supports decision making by visually displaying in true time leading and lagging indicators in a supply chain process perspective. The dashboard offers support for three areas: monitoring, analysis and management, and it contains three indicators; performance, diagnostic and control. The supply chain dashboard concept serves as basis for a supply chain studio that will allow rapid decision making based on real-time information at an aggregate level along the entire value chain. An old management adage that say “you cannot manage what you do not measure” and “to measure is to know”.