How to unlock supply chain visibility through smarter procurement

Procurement teams might have once considered supply chain visibility a nice-to-have, but that’s no longer the case. Today, it’s essential for securing a competitive advantage, helping teams mitigate risk, enhance decision-making, and maintain customer satisfaction. Many have turned to modern digital tools to clarify murky networks and build mutually beneficial supplier relationships.

Supply chain visibility solutions offer real-time insights that help teams uncover risks and operational inefficiencies. This in-depth network knowledge allows for greater strategic planning, which 71% of procurement leaders consider a top priority, according to a report by Economist Impact. 

With accurate data and agile solutions, procurement leaders can gain full visibility into their supply chain network for long-term organizational growth and enhanced profitability. 

What is supply chain visibility?

Supply chain visibility is your organization’s end-to-end insight into suppliers, logistics providers, inventory, spend, and regulatory compliance. With this visibility, you can track the movement of goods and services, forecast demand, create accurate budgets, and maintain a resilient supply chain.

Gaps in supply chain visibility can make agility, resilience, and compliance hard to achieve. They may leave you unprepared for disruptions, which puts your entire network at greater risk. Supply chain visibility helps you spot these disruptions so you can proactively avoid them. It supports making more informed decisions, exceeding customer expectations, and streamlining operations.

How does a visible supply chain work?

Real-time data and system integrations are the foundation of supply chain visibility. By capturing data at every step of the process, from sourcing raw materials to delivering final products to customers, you get a complete picture of how goods, services, and finances move through your network. 

But for this data to be useful, it must be centralized and accessible. If your systems aren’t integrated or you rely on manual processes, critical information remains siloed, making it harder to see, control, and optimize your supply chain.

A visible supply chain combines integrated systems and comprehensive analytics to give your procurement team the clarity it needs to act quickly, reduce risk, and make smarter decisions. 

Supply chain visibility vs. supply chain transparency

Supply chain visibility and supply chain transparency work together, but they serve different purposes. Visibility provides a comprehensive look into how your supply chain operates. Transparency, on the other hand, is the act of sharing this information with internal stakeholders or external partners, like suppliers. This sharing fosters clarity, ensuring teams make decisions and build strategies using the same data.

In short, supply chain visibility is the end-to-end understanding of your network, while supply chain transparency is how you share that information across your organization. 

Why supply chain visibility is important

Organizations across all sectors rely on efficient supply chains to keep internal operations running smoothly. Yet every supply chain faces challenges that can make it vulnerable to disruptions. 

Procurement teams must consistently contend with regulatory scrutiny, customer expectations, and risk mitigation. Without clear visibility, they may struggle to navigate these pressures effectively. Limited insight can lead to increased costs, lost customer trust, reduced efficiency, and delayed decision-making. 

To avoid these setbacks and support scalable operations, your team needs clear, confident insight into your supply chain. Supply chain visibility can help you save money, reduce risk, and streamline purchasing.

6 benefits of supply chain visibility

Here are six core benefits that real-time data and proactive strategies can help you achieve:

1. Fewer network disruptions: Identify and resolve network interruptions, inventory shortages, or unreliable shippers before they can cause delays. 

2. Increased efficiency with order automation: Use data to find order patterns and opportunities to automate, consolidate, and reduce costs. 

3. Boosted customer confidence: Maintain customer satisfaction by meeting their needs with efficient supply chain management fueled by visibility.

4. More contract compliance with order traceability: Track order status to help verify vendor contract compliance, reduce lead times, and optimize inventory management.

5. Greater control over spending and budgeting: Use real-time tracking to get a big-picture view of your network and spend to find opportunities to decrease expenses. 

6. Stronger connections with responsible suppliers: Understand your operational needs and find vendors aligned with responsible purchasing priorities.

    

An optimized supply chain can give your team a competitive edge in driving revenue and maintaining a healthy procurement ecosystem. But increasing visibility isn’t without challenges, so it’s essential to establish proactive measures to help address them before they get out of hand. 

Common supply chain visibility challenges

Procurement teams often face a few common challenges when improving or refining supply chain visibility. 

Challenge: Fragmented supplier networks

Working with vendors across multiple delivery areas without a central place to store data can create blind spots in spending, delivery lead times, and risk mitigation. The more disparate your network, the greater the risk of disruptions like delays, overspending, and missed savings opportunities.

A flexible procurement solution can help address fragmented networks through robust data integrations that help streamline purchasing alongside user-friendly dashboards that help simplify network insight. The right reporting tools can ensure your team can access impactful analytics anytime, so you’re never in the dark about operations. 

Challenge: Poor data quality and siloed systems

Siloed systems can slow down operations and obscure the true total cost of ownership. They make invoice verification and reconciliation lengthy and frustrating, increasing the risk of invoice payment errors or missed vendor contract violations. 

Challenge: SRP compliance and reporting burdens

Without supplier transparency, reporting on diversity or sustainability key performance indicators (KPIs) is challenging. Lacking data on which vendors hold desirable certifications can make responsible purchasing more complex and time-consuming. 

4 supply chain visibility best practices

These four best practices and the support of supply chain visibility software can strengthen your visibility and procurement strategy.

1. Centralize procurement operations

Instead of toggling between systems to piece together disparate information, centralize your procurement operations in a unified purchasing solution to gain a bird’s-eye view of the process. From this perspective, it’s easier to uncover opportunities to reduce untracked rogue spend or improve auditability. For example, Guided Buying (a Business Prime feature) can help enforce purchasing policies by steering buyers to preferred products and brands, and limiting purchasing to approved items.

2. Integrate purchasing data

Data reveals the intricacies of your network, but for it to have the most impact, it needs to be comprehensive and reliable. To foster data accuracy, your procurement team can turn to integrated procurement solutions. That’s why our smart business buying solution integrates with over 300 procurement systems, helping align your data, eliminate siloes, and provide comprehensive information for improved decision-making. 

3. Embed SRP compliance

Managing responsible purchasing can be complex, but embedding compliance into your procurement strategy helps meet regulatory requirements that impact everything from the environment to workplace safety. Procurement software with features that highlight suppliers with recognizable certifications, such as small, diverse, or local, makes it easier to source from vendors that align with your policies. 

4. Automate recurring purchases

Automating repeat orders of go-to goods saves time and reduces the risk of errors from manual processes. You can simplify recurring orders with recurring delivery and bulk pricing triggers—features that work together to give you control and visibility over ongoing purchases.

How to evaluate supply chain visibility maturity

Whether you’re starting from scratch or refining your existing supply chain visibility, it's important to understand its maturity level. These four steps can help you assess its current state:

1. Review current data collection: Identify your process for collecting, organizing, and storing data to create a baseline of present operations. 

2. Identify potential knowledge gaps: Review your current data visibility to uncover gaps in analytics and potential blind spots.

3. Consult with procurement stakeholders: Touch base with stakeholders and document pain points that enhanced visibility could resolve. 

4. Assess risk management practices: Determine how effectively your current strategies handle local and global supply chain disruptions.

    

With a better understanding of your operations, you can classify your supply chain visibility into one of four maturity stages:

1. Stage one—basic visibility: Your team has a high-level overview of your supply chain and recognizes its inefficiencies.

2. Stage two—forecasting: Your organization has robust data that allows you to future-proof your supply chain and anticipate market conditions.

3. Stage three—risk management: Your team has systems and protocols in place to mitigate risk based on supply chain data. 

4. Stage four—long-term growth: Your team leverages visibility to drive strategic growth and improve your organization's bottom line. 

    

Based on your organization’s current maturity level, you can use the next stage to create relevant KPIs.

Key questions to ask

When assessing your supply chain visibility maturity, consider key areas such as risk management, organizational transparency, inventory management, and data centralization to guide your strategy.

Use the following questions to find the information you need:

• Which systems currently collect data, and where does that data live?
• Are the current systems integrated? If yes, where could those integrations break down?
• How does the team maintain supply chain transparency across finance, accounts payable, buyers, and other departments?
• What strategies are in place to manage inventory and finances?
• What is the level of preparedness for sudden supply chain disruptions?
• Are there practices in place to prevent violations of SRP regulations?

Use these questions as a starting point and tailor your strategy to fit your organization’s specific needs, supply chain complexity, and customer requirements. 

The role of procurement in supply chain visibility

Procurement impacts the quality of your organization’s supply chain visibility. An optimized procurement workflow reveals insight into strategic sourcing, supplier relationships, purchase order-level granularity, and spend analytics. Each of these areas sheds light on your supply chain's effectiveness.

To achieve full visibility, creating seamless connections between systems is essential. Early-stage decisions, like supplier selection, payment terms, and sourcing methods, directly impact your ability to track orders from purchase requisition through to invoice payment.

The best way to gain consistent and reliable insight is by using a procurement tool. A solution that syncs with your existing ERPs, e-invoicing, and reporting platforms helps you gain greater operational clarity by centralizing everything happening across your network. These integrations improve data accuracy and reliability. 

Top-notch procurement solutions take visibility a step further by leveraging AI to uncover hidden risks, organize data, streamline automation, and improve category management, helping level up procurement. As your organization grows, procurement solutions and AI meet you where you're at, encouraging growth, profitability, and transparency.

Visibility starts with innovative procurement

A visible supply chain enables smarter buying decisions, but achieving this requires modern procurement solutions built for today's complexity. To meet these demands, start by assessing your current supply chain visibility maturity, then take strategic, data-driven steps to improve visibility and transparency. 

Amazon Business supports this transformation with features like Guided Buying and over 300 integrations with business systems. It adapts to your operational needs today and evolves with your goals over time. 

Contact our sales team to learn how we can help your organization gain end-to-end visibility through more innovative procurement.