In a digital-first shopping environment, consumers can — and do — hop between sales channels with ease. In fact, a full 89% of shoppers compare two or more online marketplaces before making a purchase. Merchants, therefore, need to adopt an omnichannel sales strategy to reach their customers across every shopping platform. However, not all platforms have the same fulfillment requirements, leaving merchants to stitch together multiple supply chain strategies to meet the needs of each platform, which can be a costly and time-consuming process. As a result, end-to-end visibility across the supply chain may deteriorate with different partners, carriers, and technology solutions.  

Whether you’re a manufacturer, supplier or retailer, it can be nearly impossible to gain real-time visibility and tracking from the factory floor to your customers’ front door. In fact, only 6% of companies report full visibility of their supply chain, leading to inefficiencies and a diminished ability to respond to disruptions. The main challenge is the lack of a consolidated, or “single pane of glass,” view of goods and shipments from the time product is ordered, put on a ship, on a truck to a warehouse, or in-transit to a customer. Everyone’s view is either limited or must be stitched together using multiple tools and systems. As a result, it is extremely difficult to have a comprehensive set of data that can help with every step of the process that is integrated across multiple solutions. Over the next year or so, we may see this single pane become a reality in the form of an end-to-end supply chain control tower, as retailers want to have end-to-end visibility before they invest in artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions.  

Importance of Technology-Based Systems and Data 

While many companies are making strides to help solve the challenge — carriers like UPS, for example, make it easy to look at a certain portion of movement of goods — visibility goes beyond solely knowing where orders are at any given point. Technology-based solutions that can integrate inventory and shipment data across distributed channels and systems while the chain of custody and mode of transportation changes, can save countless hours and expense spent trying to monitor and respond to changes. Having partners that can provide your business with near-time insights into inventory levels and fulfillment and delivery statuses will help you get closer to end-to-end visibility.  

To help solve this challenge, all of the technology platform providers — inventory management, enterprise resource planning (ERP), warehouse management systems (WMS) and shipping carriers — need to evolve to a level that makes the sharing of data more accessible, using modern integration patterns. Both IoT sensors and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tagging will soon be seen as required capabilities for managing an effective supply chain, because of their combined ability to enhance the needs for real-time visibility as product moves within a warehouse, but also during transit. The information provided by these tools can be integrated into an inventory management system or ERP to provide a real-time, comprehensive view of your inventory across your supply chain and can play a huge role in tracking shrinkage and loss.  

Specifically, IoT can be deployed in many different aspects of the supply chain, helping merchants to revolutionize the way they handle logistics and operations. For example, IoT-enabled sensors and devices can provide real-time tracking and monitoring of vehicles and packages, data on inventory management like stock levels, condition monitoring of goods and technology, route optimization, warehouse automation, demand forecasting and more. There are endless ways for IoT to help optimize and improve supply chain operations through access to data. RFID tagging uses radio frequency to share information about an object’s unique identity, and as a result it can read hundreds of tags in a short amount of time, reducing the reliance on manually scanning barcodes for inventory management. This technology can be integrated into every step of the supply chain — factory, warehouse and retail store — and helps with accuracy, efficiency and, most importantly, visibility in shipping and inventory management.

Currently, the majority (63%) of companies do not use any technology to monitor their supply chain performance. However, the correct technology, enabling integration between solutions and data, is the key to solving the puzzle of supply chain end-to-end visibility. And while we know what the pieces to the puzzle are, it is a continued challenge to put them together in order to crack the code of offering visibility over every step of the ordering, fulfilling and delivery processes. As a result, retailers, technology providers and supply chain experts must work together to find solutions that will get them one step closer to making the “single pane of glass” a reality.  

Brian Gallagher is CTO at Ware2Go.