Eric Joiner has written a post over at Freight Dawg commenting on a piece by Dan Gilmore at Supply Chain Digest. The topic is supply chain best practices.

I posted a comment there that I wanted to share here as well.

I agree with you that visibility, especially in this day of increasingly distributed, global operations, is a best practice that can stand the test of time.

Visibility is at the root of solving so many problems – without it, you really don’t have the foundation and “single version of the truth” so important to problem solving.

I do believe, however, that visibility alone is rarely enough. One of the biggest problems facing supply chain professionals today is dealing with constant change. Visibility is essential to solving this problem. However, visibility alone is not enough. To quickly and accurately respond to change, people need to be empowered with both visibility and tools to collaborate, analyze and choose the best response actions (course corrections) to implement.

I agree that a lot of best practices are market/business specific and will evolve as conditions do, but I think visibility is a key best practice that will benefit everyone – provided it is not seen as the end solution but the basis of a solution to solving specific problems.

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