Webinar Recap: Enhancing Supply Chain Collaboration Through Visibility

For our recent webinar, we were joined by industry experts from the Digital Container Shipping Association (DCSA), Global Shippers Forum and Shipping and Freight Resource for a discussion of how data standards and visibility tools have taken on greater importance in a volatile supply chain environment, and how they are enabling new ways of working with the various actors in your supply chain.

Watch the full discussion or keep reading for a recap of the key takeaways.

Visibility Isn't Just an Internal Capability

To realize the full benefits of visibility, you have to extend it to the other actors in your supply chain. When everyone has a real-time view of what's happening, you can accelerate your time to action and work quicker to respond to risks and disruptions as they arise. Doing so also enables you to fundamentally change ways of working across your supply chain by automating a huge amount of logistics and order related admin, and freeing up operators to focus on risk response and improving long term reliability.

Data Standards Are Making an Impact

Data quality and visibility go hand in hand. The adoption of data standards in the shipping industry, facilitated by the work of the DCSA, is helping to simplify the exchange of information across different actors in the supply chain, making it easier for companies to track shipments, manage schedules, and handle documentation.

Understand the Present, Analyze the Past, Predict the Future

Different data serves different purposes for shippers. Real-time data can alert you to issues and guide 'in the moment' decision making. Historical analytics help you understand the systemic drivers of supply chain performance and risk, informing your supply chain strategy. As you amass a larger data set, you'll also gain the ability to start predicting future outcomes. The sooner you start building your visibility data set, the sooner you'll be able to reap these benefits.

Security and Data Ownership

As businesses seek to protect themselves from cyber risk, data security and ownership are important considerations when it comes to the implementation of visibility solutions. Shippers want to be assured their data is handled securely and these are important questions to ask when you are looking to invest in a visibility solution. It is important to remember, however, that unlike other tools in your tech stack, visibility tools don't typically handle any personal identifiable information (PII), so the general risk profile is less than a payments or CRM solution.

Visibility Solutions for SMEs

Good supply chain tech is no longer the exclusive domain of enterprises. Visibility can deliver huge value for SMEs where employees are more likely to be wearing multiple hats. Solutions like Beacon are designed to be completely non-technical and priced affordably to scale with SMEs as they grow.

‍