SAPinsider will be publishing a research report, Supply Chain Planning in The Cloud this month. As the survey for this research come to a close, many interesting insights emerge. One of the key ones is how SAPinsiders view supply chain planning as an important tool to build business resiliency and agility. Since the top business drivers focus on resiliency and agility, strategies that SAPinsiders are formulating to address business drivers also revolve around resiliency and agility. Building end-to-end visibility (67%), Developing a single source of truth for the end-to-end supply chain (39%), and leveraging real-time insights (39%), all pertain to the resiliency and agility and support associated business drivers, as shown in figure 1. While there is no doubt that technology solutions today are powerful enablers available to organizations looking to build supply chain visibility, there is much more than technology that goes into building supply chain visibility capabilities. SAP has partnered with solution providers like Project 44 and Four Kites to extend the powerful visibility capabilities that are already embedded in its solutions. Third-party partner solutions like Descartes also offer their own suite of visibility products in areas like freight and transportation. There are some foundational aspects to building visibility, that we have covered in these articles: Building Foundations of Supply Chain Visibility Supply Chain Visibility Foundations Beyond Technology But a key question that many SAPinsiders pose is, what is the roadmap to build robust supply chain visibility capabilities?

Steps to Map Visibility Journey

While the survey was focused on the supply chain, remember that even siloed supply chain visibility, despite being end-to-end, may not always be the visibility you want for true business resiliency. This goes back to 75% of respondents indicating that they need integration between their supply chain and financial planning systems. At a high level, to map your visibility needs, you need to follow the following steps:

• Document points of failures in your processes. Example: List all supply chain challenges that your organization normally runs into.
• Brainstorm to understand which of those challenges can be attributed to lack of data visibility, despite the data being available within the organization.
• If you already developed the visibility capability for the process in which the failure occurred, understand if the failure was a result of people, processes, or data.
• Understand how to eliminate those points of failure through changes or modifications in the element responsible while retaining the process visibility. Make the first three steps outlined a continuous process.
• For the challenges/disruptions identified in second step, understand what the flow of data should have been if lack of visibility turns out to the reason behind failure.
• Evaluate if the required visibility can be attained through existing systems or invest in solutions to build visibility.
• However, while working with individual processes, understand the linkage visibility gaps between processes. So any investments in visibility solutions must keep the end-to-end visibility aspect in perspective.