Supply chain metrics and monitoring: A playbook for visibility wins

Even for the most digitally mature organizations, supply chain visibility can be an elusive goal.

Despite years of investment in supply chain transformation initiatives, upgraded systems, and data infrastructure, many businesses still operate in silos that obscure visibility and prevent an overview of their entire supply chain, along with all its unique twists and turns.

The right supply chain metrics and monitoring techniques can pull back the curtain on supply chain performance, shining a light on bottlenecks and inefficiencies, while enabling proactive, data-driven decisions.

Keep reading this playbook as we share a practical approach for accurate supply chain monitoring, and turning supply chain metrics into visibility wins that can actively boost resilience and agility.

Opaque operations: Why is supply chain visibility so hard to achieve?

Firstly, it’s worth investigating the factors that make supply chain visibility such a moving target. Here are some of the biggest obstacles to a clear view:

Limited real-time data

To make informed and proactive decisions about supply chain management, enterprises need access to the right data at the right time. But many outdated systems still rely on batch processing or manual reporting, which makes real time monitoring impossible.

A patchwork of systems

ERP platforms, individual supplier portals, warehouse and order management systems... we could go on. These systems are often improperly integrated so they communicate poorly – resulting in data siloes that impair supply chain visibility.

External dependencies

With a multi-tiered supplier network to navigate, along with a wide variety of partners like freight brokers and logistics providers, it’s very challenging to accurately track supply chain performance, or the true impact of any disruptions.

No standardized metrics

Even if every team in an enterprise is aligned on metrics (which is doubtful), any supply chain partners are likely to have their own measurements and definitions. Standardizing those metrics is central to operational efficiency.

Organizational silos

Sharing real-time information with other teams can feel risky in some supply chain environments, or might even be discouraged. These organizational silos wreak havoc on supply chain efficiency, and eliminate opportunities for collaboration and optimization.

Metrics and monitoring: What role do they play in operational visibility?

Supply chain metrics play a critical role in achieving operational visibility. From inventory turnover to order fill rate and supply chain cycle time, key metrics allow enterprises to get an accurate picture of how their processes are (or aren’t) working.

Tracking these metrics empowers supply chain managers to make fully informed, data-driven decisions. By monitoring them over time, and using tools to extract actionable insights from the data, they can pinpoint improvement opportunities (e.g. excess inventory), and take measures to reduce supply chain costs, enhance customer service, and boost brand reputation.

In turn, all of those actions help to insulate enterprises against disruption, and bolster their resilience.

• Read our article on the ‘5 metrics every supply chain professional should track’.

Visibility wins for a clearer view of your supply chain operation

Complex supply chains are multifaceted and cross-functional by nature. Even with the best tools and tactics available, achieving complete supply chain visibility is very difficult. That said, there are several targeted strategies which can help enterprises to gain a clearer picture of their supply chain operations, so they can be more proactive and agile.

Finding (and learning from) bottlenecks

Bottlenecks may slow the supply chain process, but they’re a useful symptom – usually highlighting deeper structural issues like disconnected systems, misaligned processes, and overloaded departments.

Keeping tabs on supply chain metrics like cycle time, order lead time, and throughput variance will help identify the areas where delays regularly occur.

Unifying disparate data

It sounds obvious, but there are countless sources of data in the supply chain – not just across different vendors and suppliers, but also from different tools, systems, and teams within the organization itself.

Unifying this data is a complex task, but with innovative technology like process mining, teams can reveal granular event and object-centric data across entire supply chains. This gives organizations the visibility needed to take action to make these processes work.

Proactive (and continuous) monitoring

One of the best strategies for reducing the impact of disruption is proactive supply chain monitoring, whether to prevent cybersecurity issues, raw materials shortages, or something more left field. That means isolating the issue before it can affect a single customer order.

What does this look like in practice? Businesses can set up real-time alerts to preemptively flag any causes for concern. For example, if forecasting against predictive thresholds suggests that supplier lead times will exceed the usual expected variance.

Paired with intelligent automation, continuous monitoring techniques like this give organizations more wiggle room to find alternative suppliers or other solutions to minimize disruption.

• Watch how Campari Group drives AI innovation to tackle blocked sales orders

Making metrics actionable: collaboration is key

Accurate supply chain monitoring is one thing, but interpreting metrics to fully grasp their meaning and turn them into actionable steps is another.

The key lies in collaboration. When individual stakeholders share a single view on which metrics matter most, what “good” supply chain performance looks like, and agree on a set of shared KPIs, there’s joint accountability and clarity on how to move forward.

With proper stakeholder alignment, teams share an understanding of which metrics to monitor, who owns the process for each, and what the signals for success (or falling below industry standards) look like. An intuitive supply chain dashboard can make a huge difference when it comes to getting all parties on the same page – contextualizing metrics, visualizing trends with analytics, and exposing the root cause of fluctuations in performance.

Ultimately, this collaboration can transform supply chain metrics from diagnostic signposts to constructive, strategic insights that can help future-proof an enterprise.

Celonis Process Intelligence Platform: Your supply chain command center

The Celonis Process Intelligence Platform maximizes supply chain visibility, even for enterprises dealing with global, multi-layered supply chains in highly-regulated industries.

Using object-centric process mining, our platform takes the data from every system, team, and process in a business, then augments it with the unique context of that business, in order to create a digital twin of the organization that updates in real time.

This gives enterprises an unprecedented level of transparency, not only showing how each micro-process making up the supply chain runs, but connecting them to reveal the whole, eradicating data and organizational silos.

The Celonis Process Intelligence Platform acts as a true command center for the supply chain, with a sophisticated dashboard that unifies disparate data for easy consumption and supports stakeholder alignment and action. Finally, a single source of truth to inform effective supply chain improvement action.

Want to learn more about our Process Intelligence Platform, as well as what it could reveal and improve when it comes to your supply chain processes? Get in touch to speak to an expert on the Celonis team, or read more on what Celonis can do for your supply chain.