Fulfillment services help make business life easier for eCommerce companies – and visibility is a key part of that ease.
In order to better manage inventory and monitor shipments, end-to-end visibility is an absolute essential. Unfortunately, many companies lack this visibility and miss out on key information that could make their business lives – and the lives of their customers – easier. With visibility, you can more clearly and completely see if and how carriers are delivering what they promise, where there may be bottlenecks in your process and how your customers are being served by third-party vendors. In short, visibility is the best way to ensure that reliable and timely orders and being transferred through your entire sales process.
Visibility Should Be A Priority For Fulfillment Services
Since visibility is so important, it’s a surprise that more companies don’t make it a priority. However, understanding the need for visibility and being able to implement visibility in practice are two different things. There are several reasons why visibility can be hard to grasp for some organizations. Most often this is due to the complexity of the supply chain. Supply chains can have multiple steps involved, which can make it difficult to maintain visibility.
In order to keep tabs on the status and location of orders, in a time of tight margins, a lot of data is created but not all this data may be accessible. If transportation, inventory management and logistics are all kept in separate locations, it can be difficult for anyone externally or internally to glean strategic information.
Aiming For Total Visibility
It’s essential to aim for visibility. Business priorities should be the focus of any type of analysis, but if your fulfillment is running without visibility it can be hard to know if you’re making the mark. When organizations don’t focus on their business priorities they can find themselves lost in the virtual weeds. With end-to-end supply chain visibility, organizations of all sizes can recognize what is working and what needs to be tweaked or eliminated completely. When a supply chain can become visible – and most importantly optimized – it can help the business achieve operational as well as fiscal goals.
In addition, gaps in visibility can create blind spots in fulfillment process, which can lower the likelihood of optimization. Unfortunately, the problem only becomes worse as an organization grows. When a company gets larger, the functions of it can become increasingly siloed, leading to gaps in visibility. This compartmentalization can be a barrier to insight that can prevent your organization from making strategic decisions.
When companies can better understand what is happening throughout their supply chain, from start to finish, they can better receive and understand the insight they need to make strategic decisions. This information can reveal inefficiencies in the fulfillment process, and uncover opportunities for streamlining and costs savings that can lead to a better reputation with customers, lower operating costs and more opportunities for growth.
