The Supply Chain Visibility Crisis: How to Overcome Hidden Barriers

It’s no secret that your supply chain is a crucial part of your business and an important driver of profit, growth, and customer satisfaction. But here’s where it gets mind-boggling. Are you sitting down? Because I have a stat that may shock you. 

According to a recent study, only 6% of companies have full visibility into their supply chain. 6%! That’s a staggering number considering how critical supply chain health is to the overall success of your business.

It’s time to do something about getting your supply chain working.

The Problem

The issue lies in the fact that many organizations, like yours, are operating with barriers in their supply chain. Barriers within supply chain processes, between company silos, and between them, their suppliers, and customers. As a result, they don’t have a way to see the complete lifecycle of an order—from purchase order to invoice. Obviously not knowing when an order actually ships is bound to cause problems for your customers, which is why they charge you costly fines, fees, and chargebacks. And lacking that visibility makes it time-consuming or impossible to identify the root causes and prevent them. 

For a manufacturer or distributor without that full visibility, it’s a struggle to identify and fix the root cause of late or inaccurate shipments. Their customers aren’t concerned about the reason for these exceptions, they just hit them with costly fines, fees, and chargebacks. And without a way to prevent those oversights, they are resigned to investigating on a case-by-case basis, making only incremental progress towards stopping the same issues from happening again.

Many companies lose visibility into inventory levels after placing an order. Without knowing when the order will arrive at the warehouse, they must increase their safety stock and excess inventory, leading to longer inventory days. They also struggle to identify discrepancies between orders (especially if they’ve been changed), shipments, and invoices, forcing them to manually cross-reference data from multiple systems.

Not to mention they may not even have the necessary historical data stored somewhere accessible. It can be too expensive to store historical data, so their supply chain teams can’t investigate or resolve problems that happened weeks or months prior. And since departments and business partners all view different supply chain data in slightly different ways, it’s difficult to collaborate and solve problems together. 

Here’s an example of what I mean…

• A Fortune 50 retailer spent multiple years and millions of dollars building a custom platform to measure On-Time-In-Full rates by supplier.
• A full ten people on another national retailer’s inventory team manually put together vendor scorecards to share with vendors every month. 
• A global manufacturer spends millions of dollars a year on price discrepancy chargebacks alone, with no automated mechanism to catch those discrepancies at the time they invoice their customers.

If any of this sounds familiar, keep reading, I’m going to tell you about a groundbreaking tool that has the ability to optimize your supply chain, help your company save money, and make your life easier. 

How Syncrofy for Supply Chain Can Help

Syncrofy for Supply Chain (SSC) is your ultimate weapon for eliminating chargebacks, aiding your inventory management, and preventing late payments and shipments. It’s a powerful, cloud-based data visibility platform that breaks down barriers across your supply chain and enables you to consolidate information that’s scattered throughout multiple systems, making it accessible for all users in all departments, without having to leverage IT staff or resources. 

SSC’s robust technology calculates fill rate and lead time for both orders and shipments without customization or configuration and reconciles invoices against purchase orders, shipments, and receipts to measure key performance indicators like fill rate and lead time, and identify quantity and price discrepancies. It will help you:

• Reduce revenue leakage by up to 30% due to late shipments (for retailers)
• Reduce chargebacks by up to 30% by correcting errors before they happen (for suppliers)
• Eliminate late payments to suppliers, avoid credit holds, and save an average of 2% on payments 
• Reduce the amount of time spent on research by up to 53%
• Achieve an ROI of up to three times your initial investment

With SSC by your side, you’ll be empowered to make smarter, better-informed decisions, prioritizing the initiatives which will have the most impact on revenue or cost savings. It will also help you work more efficiently, alleviate the burden on your IT teams, and significantly improve customer satisfaction across the board.

Sound good so far? Then you’re gonna love the next section. Here’s what really makes Syncrofy stand out from the rest. 

What Makes It Different?

SSC stands out from other solutions in the marketplace because it provides you with full visibility and valuable insights on your supply chain right out of the box. There’s nothing to configure, no mapping, or specialized data warehouse required. From the get go, you can see what’s going on across your supply chain, what’s working, and where potential problems may occur. This allows you to be proactive, prevent costly fines and fees, and eliminate late payments and shipments.

Because it helps you prevent chargebacks before they happen, it will be easier for your organization to implement a chargeback program to monitor obligations, prioritize initiatives, and carry out an improvement plan.

It’s also designed for everyone in your organization. SSC was created specifically with the non-technical user in mind so there’s no need for data scientists or database administrators. You’re able to see your supply chain as it’s happening in a human-readable, easy to understand format. You’ll also get pre-configured tools to make fast, well-informed decisions on your supply chain that you can’t get with any other platform.

SSC is the key to empowering your organization and creating a data-driven culture. Its ease of use enables your employees and business partner network to share information, work together, and solve problems collaboratively, without relying on IT resources. 

Ready to Get Started?

The only way to truly understand what SSC can do for your supply chain is to experience it for yourself. Contact us today for a complimentary demo and let us show you how it can break down supply chain barriers, help you achieve real-time visibility, and allow you to run your business with confidence.

Click here to learn more and sign up for your free demo of this new, powerful solution.