Transparency in supply chain

In recent years, the supply chain has become a series of disconnected islands and siloed steps taken through product development, manufacturing, distribution, marketing and finally to the end customer. Breaking down all the barriers, digitisation has made the supply chain a completely integrated ecosystem with transparency across all the stakeholders involved.

Consumers have been insisting that the brands disclose more information about their supply chains but the companies ask them to rely on one tool – ‘Trust’. Nevertheless, it drives into the biggest financial risks in this new age of consumerism, values and ethics driving consumer behaviour rather than convenience or cost.

Ensuring quality control is one of the principles in maintaining cold chain integrity. Currently, cold chain shipment is gaining a high degree of transparency into the system and is no easy task, requiring both technical sophistication and a high degree of human intervention. But once it is achieved, the benefits are significant, and not limited to inventory savings and planning improvements.

Visibility becomes crucial and also critical for certain items in the industry. For example, vaccines which are very sensitive and difficult in terms of supply chain needs continues monitoring and visibility. Slightest change in the environment & improper handling can  destroy the complete inventory of vaccines which is currently not affordable during current pandemic situation.

Our platform SCMProFit has well-established expertise in cold chain and deals with vaccine distribution which can manage in and out operations, temperature monitoring on a real-time basis, Distribution, configurable SOPs, end-to-end visibility with KPI dashboards, 100 percent web-based solution, and with various features. Lots of manual paper works which are managed at hub/regional/district and health facilities can be now managed in one single digital platform enabling to have real-time visibility of the vaccines maintained and consumed, reducing the wastage.

Today, digitisation has enabled more transparent and accurate end-to-end tracking in the supply chain. With digitisation, organisations can track assets from production to delivery with utmost transparency providing more visibility to both businesses and consumers. Above all when transparency is in question, trust and collaboration come into the picture among several organisations.

Transparency protocols have become crucial to a business’s operations as it is now a metric by which brands and retailers are being judged. If businesses can learn how to effectively adapt, navigate and communicate across their value chain, there is a clear opportunity to turn these costs and risks into the potential upside.

Be it ecommerce, cold chain distribution, warehousing, freight forwarding, the focus area for any supply chain to be successful is the efficient exchange of information. Traditionally, an unorganised supply chain led to incomplete and lack of real-time information. B2C markets are pulling companies along to provide this level of visibility, demanding more information about shipment arrivals with real-time updates with digital enhancement.

When consumers can view a product’s journey on their finger-tip, they develop trust for a brand or business. Collaboration between the stakeholders makes every level in the supply chain more transparent which has a direct and positive impact on sales.