New research from Aberdeen shows that leaders in global supply chain visibility report improved performance across key metrics (see more on the report here). The report shows that leaders have reduced lead times from international locations, reduced inventory levels and reduced inventory carrying costs.

In another Aberdeen report entitled Beyond Supply Chain Visibility: Response Management is the Key (available here) their research findings show that supply chain visibility ranks as one of the top two application focus areas for companies as part of their supply chain technology investment plans. The ability to respond to change rapidly is emerging as critical to a company’s success. Just having visibility is not enough to manage this constant change. This research brief outlines the key characteristics of solutions that go beyond visibility toward enabling a flexible Response Management capability.

There’s no question that visibility is gaining more attention as companies struggle with increasingly distributed and multi-enterprise fulfillment networks and supply chains. The demand management and supply management challenges in these environments are complex as companies try to gain an upper hand on constant changes in demand, supply and product. Companies continue to find that their employees face an increasing number of decisions that require human judgment and that, while visibility is a pre-requisite, tools to collaboratively simulate various action alternatives and choose the actions that are best aligned with corporate metrics are required to proactively respond to the literally hundreds of daily changes that must be managed.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 11:46 am and is filed under Best practices, Collaboration, Response Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.