What is supply chain visibility? Challenges, numbers and solutions
In a market that is constantly evolving and increasingly focused on quality and transparency, supply chain visibility requires solutions that can make sense of the numerous quality and logistics data generated by tracking tools and methods.Food and logistics companies operating nationally and internationally have to manage a variety of software and compliance and logistics tools, often also paper-based, to ensure food safety compliance, track products and know the performance of processes: traceability and the fight against food waste are prerogatives increasingly demanded by the market, and require advanced digital tools to speed up and ensure controls as much as possible.
Considering visibility and collaboration as central elements of a safe and reliable supply chain is an evident and increasingly widespread trend worldwide, and is gradually being embraced by the Italian market as well. Key themes include the ability to:
- Gain visibility through open systems, which with little effort connect to company information systems or even require no integration;
- Obtain visibility not only in specific phases (e.g. transport), but be able to push along multiple processes (e.g. storage, goods entry/exit, etc.) and even in a full supply chain perspective with multiple partners;
- Get granular visibility, down to the parcel/item level.
The numbers of visibility
A study published in the Journal of Food Science identified "strong evidence" that temperature management and track & trace systems for perishable foods "improve cold chain efficiency, decrease food waste, and improve food safety."
These same systems, which are more generically referred to as "digital supply chains", lower procurement costs by 20%, reduce supply chain process costs by 50%, and increase revenue by 10%.
Wenda: a Platform for supply chain visibility
Wenda has developed a universal and collaborative Platform that enables food and logistics companies to gain visibility into products and processes in the chain. This is done through management, analysis and rapid sharing of tracking, temperature, visibility data from production to consumer, supporting the most common tracking devices and monitoring systems.
The Platform is based on a few key principles: it is all-in-one, to manage all temperature and track & trace data in a single cloud space and in each individual module; it is end-to-end, to ensure complete visibility of all processes under its responsibility; it is farm-to-fork, to foster collaboration and trust with suppliers and customers along the entire supply chain; it is open, thanks to its software architecture designed to be interoperable with multiple track & trace technologies; it is analytical, systematically providing detailed information from integrated data so that data-based and real-time decisions can be made.