Supply chain visibility: how it can improve the bottom line

Not so long ago, the supply chain for businesses was very linear. It rarely involved more than two or three stages, and most supply chain logistics were contained within a single country.

In 2025, things are different. The modern business supply chain can be complex and spread out across several countries, hundreds of employees, and dozens of partners.

This adds several challenges in terms of planning and day-to-day organisation. Supply chains are now more at risk than ever from external geopolitical factors, bottlenecks, and delays caused by regulatory pressure and legislation. And as customer expectations consistently increase, any supply chain disruption can be damaging for a business.

This is why supply chain visibility has become so vital. Developing and maintaining a broad understanding of everything that’s going on can help a business stay on top of its operations and be more capable of identifying potential issues before they become a problem.

In this article, we’ll take a close look at what supply chain visibility is, how it works, and why it’s important.

• What is supply chain visibility (SCV)?
• Why supply chain visibility matters today
• How supply chain visibility works
• The benefits of supply chain visibility
• A step-by-step guide to improving supply chain visibility
• Key challenges and how to overcome them
• Real-world examples of SCV in action
• Future trends in supply chain visibility
• Wrapping up

Supply chain visibility allows a business to monitor all aspects of its supply chain operations from start to finish. It might include aspects such as raw material sourcing, manufacturing lead times, route optimisation, shipping updates and inventory management.

When a business has access to real-time data on these individual areas, management can leverage that information to maximise the efficiency of its supply chain. This will often lead to better operational output, improved customer trust through transparency and authority and stronger supplier relationships.

Our world is more connected than ever, but that connectivity comes with greater potential for issues that can cause problems for supply chains. As a result, supply chain visibility isn’t just a perk anymore; it’s essential for ensuring a business can thrive.

According to findings from our Trends in Manufacturing Report, 67% of manufacturers have experienced supply disruptions since 2020, with 59% reporting that these issues still persist to some degree.

Supply chain management is an area that many businesses are still trying to master, but the constant shifting geopolitical climate and rapidly evolving advancements continue to make it challenging.

If you want evidence that robust supply chain visibility matters, you need look no further than the impact the pandemic had on supply chains across all industries; many businesses realised that their processes weren’t equipped to deal with such a sudden and unexpected upheaval. Consequently, companies in sectors such as the semiconductor industry were faced with extended periods of uncertainty.

Businesses are also under considerable consumer pressure as a result of significant competition, demands for ethically sourced resources and products, and high expectations for rapid delivery times and transparency.

Supply chain visibility has a fairly universal process regardless of which industry you’re in. However, significant technological advancements, largely driven by AI and automation, have enabled it. These applications and software have helped make complete supply chain visibility possible by unifying people, systems, and technology.

Let’s take a look at some of the key components of the process.

As with most modern tech operations, the process starts with data. Supply chains generate vast amounts of data from a wide range of sources and in various forms. For example, a business might need to collect data from suppliers, an ERP system, radio frequency identification (RFID) reports, and its own CRM platform.

This is why it’s vital for a business to standardise and centralise its data into one manageable source. It’s the only way to ensure leadership can access a holistic view of everything that’s going on at all times throughout the supply chain.

Once a business has collected all the data, it must process the data and share it across the supply chain to ensure everyone knows the status of a delivery. Many businesses will use a dedicated data cloud platform such as Salesforce that can store this vital data securely and provide advanced security and access levels, as well as key supplier portals.

At this stage, businesses will transform the collected data into information that can help the team manage and monitor all aspects of the supply chain, relying on a combination of advanced reporting, supply chain analytics and real-time insights to understand the datasets.

For example, data from the various suppliers along the chain can be fed into dedicated AI machine learning (ML) systems to help generate predictive analytics on when and where an issue might arise.

With the help of processes such as data analytics, businesses can be more proactive about managing potential problems before they develop, with decision-making informed by real information rather than gut instinct or guesswork.

For example, a business can receive alerts about low stock levels or an impending delivery date. Automated update queries can then be sent to suppliers to determine the current delivery status, which can then be passed along to customers.

In the event of potential delays, businesses can use data to explore rerouting options or use a just-in-time (JIT) inventory strategy to source materials from additional suppliers.

In essence, data within the context of supply chain visibility leads to fast decision-making and actions that can be shared across the entire chain.

Supply chain visibility is essential for both day-to-day operations and the long term, proactive strategic planning that will help give a business an advantage over its competitors.

Many businesses often underestimate the scope of what true visibility entails. It encompasses far more than just tracking shipments and providing updates. When it’s implemented correctly, it helps to transform a business in a number of ways.

In the short term, supply chain visibility can make the lives of your logistics team much less stressful. Some of the key benefits include:

• Operational efficiency: The overall efficiency of the business improves when you don’t have to spend time and energy putting out fires that appear along the supply chain. With the correct systems in place, you can be assured that any potential issues will already be accounted for.
• Cost reduction: Supply chain visibility will help reduce the number of lost sales due to stockouts. You’ll also be able to optimise routes and shipping costs, as well as warehouse management and usage, all of which will save your business money.
• Inventory optimisation: In addition to avoiding stockouts, you’ll also be able to optimise the inventory coming into your business. Using strategies such as ABC analysis in tandem with real-time information from your suppliers, you’ll be able to strike a perfect balance with your stock levels.
• Customer satisfaction: If your stock levels are consistently accurate and equipped to handle demand and your lead times are fast, your customers will receive their products on time, which can boost their satisfaction.

Supply chain visibility can also benefit businesses in the long term. The longer you have the processes in place, the more datasets are created and the more informed your decisions will become.

Some of the main benefits include:

• Risk mitigation: By using things such as early detection alerts and by carefully monitoring geopolitical events, you can better identify potential risks before they become realities and create contingency plans for them.
• Enhanced forecasting: With full visibility on your inventory trends, customer sentiments, customer behaviour and warehouse resources, you’ll be able to forecast shifts in demand and potential sales with a high level of accuracy.
• Compliance and sustainability: Supply chain visibility is vital for demonstrating transparency for compliance purposes, which is particularly important for international businesses that must adhere to cross-border regulations. It also helps illustrate a business’s commitment to sustainable practices, such as ethical resourcing of raw materials and using clean energy transportation methods.
• Resilience and adaptability: There was a time when a single supply chain disruption could bring an entire business down. Resilient supply chain visibility helps remove this risk and provides businesses with the capability of responding to issues quickly with flexible, alternative solutions.

Many businesses will likely have some form of supply chain visibility in place, but many will stick to a basic approach, such as using scheduled stock checks and tracking updates. To be truly effective, however, the supply chain visibility process needs to go much deeper.

What follows is a set of key steps and considerations that we believe are necessary for an effective supply chain visibility process:

Your first job is to identify every individual rivet in the supply chain for a given product or resource. You need to map out all sources of potential disruptions and uncover blind spots so you can devise a contingency plan for each stage.

You must bring together all data from your various supply chain points. You may have substantial data siloes that have formed from years of segmented operations; these datasets need to be broken down, transferred and standardised into a universal format, making it easier for AI machines to interpret.

When everyone works from the same datasets, cross-team collaboration is far easier and more productive.

Achieving full supply chain visibility is a complex process, but you can simplify it by investing in the appropriate technologies. You can leverage applications and processes such as the Internet of Things (IoT) to help track assets in real-time, agentic AI to integrate processes into a single system and blockchain to create a secure, transparent record of transactions, movements and updates.

A key part of achieving success with supply chain visibility is knowing whether all parts of the chain are working as optimally as possible. To obtain this information, you’ll need to carefully track a number of key performance indicators (KPIs) over a sustained period of time.

Some of the most important include:

• Order accuracy
• On-time-in-full (OTIF) rates
• Forecast accuracy
• Supplier reliability
• Lead time variability

Aside from the overall efficiency it brings to the business, one of the main benefits of supply chain visibility is the communication it fosters between the various parties along the chain. When you get this right, you can build very strong relationships with a wide selection of suppliers, securing alternative options if your primary choice is unable to fulfil a delivery.

It also helps to establish transparency and trust between your business and your customers. If you’re able to clearly present to them the reasons for delays and offer resolutions or accurate revised timescales, this is much more valuable than not communicating with them.

You won’t be able to establish effective supply chain visibility overnight. You’ll have to implement it in stages, starting from a basic tracking of key factors within the chain (such as shipping updates, lead times, and inventory management) before progressing to more predictive and proactive solutions.

Your end goal should be to achieve prescriptive, holistic, data-driven visibility across the entire chain, but it’s not something you should try to accomplish all at once.

There’s a reason that full-scale, real-time supply chain visibility still evades most businesses; it’s not an easy thing to pull off. As you might expect, the bigger your business becomes, the longer your supply chain will likely become, and the more complex your operations will be.

Still, there are a handful of challenges that will likely affect all businesses when trying to achieve supply chain visibility, regardless of size and sector.

Not only will your own business likely have data silos to manage, but there’s a high chance that other organisations within your supply chain will have them, as well. Additionally, each of them will likely have different systems in play, with some using more modern systems and others using outdated legacy systems. This can make standardising and organising data across the whole chain quite tricky.

It’s why so many of our customers rely on our Data Cloud software. It allows businesses to unify siloed data from multiple systems in real time, harmonising profiles that power visibility and decision-making.

Not only will your business be required to communicate with all aspects of the chain in real time, but there will often be situations in which external parties along the chain may need to communicate with each other as well. It can be tough to establish relationships with businesses that are often reluctant to share their data with others.

You can solve this with partner portals and our own MuleSoft application software. With MuleSoft, our customers can connect suppliers, distributors and logistics service providers to their Salesforce platform, ensuring upstream and downstream data is visible in real time.

Communication is essential to the success of supply chain visibility. Knowing when to communicate with external partners, like most things, is a skill that takes time to develop. It’s why businesses must commit to training their workforce not only to operate new systems and applications, but also to communicate with external parties via powerful tools.

With Slack , our customers gain access to one of the best workplace communication platforms on the planet. It allows for seamless collaboration between suppliers, partners and internal teams, improving efficiency along the entire supply chain.

As mentioned, supply chain visibility is a complicated process, often involving dozens of moving parts, and the costs of implementation can quickly add up.

Many businesses will future-proof their operations by adopting a cloud-based platform early on, making scaling up a more straightforward and less costly endeavour. You should also look to stagger your adoption by introducing visibility in phases.

Salesforce Platform does all of this and so much more. It provides a modular, cloud-first foundation that lets businesses start small (core CRM, analytics) and scale towards advanced, AI-powered supply chain visibility.

There’s no question that effective SCV is difficult to achieve. However, some businesses are making great progress in laying the foundations for long-term success, with their supply chain visibility and management playing a key role in this.

Swissbit began working with Salesforce with the goal of becoming the market leader in IoT solutions. Not only did they want to develop a universal platform that could house all of their sales and business operations, but they also wanted to dramatically improve their supply chain visibility by having all relevant data available at a glance.

They achieved this through the complete integration of their ERP system with the Salesforce platform, creating a single source of truth for all supply chain processes. By using software such as Manufacturing Cloud to fulfil their customers’ tailored requests, they were able to increase their outputs and gain a vital competitive edge.

Additionally, Beyond Better Foods was able to use a combination of Salesforce’s out-of-the-box features and many of our excellent partner apps on our AppExchange marketplace to transform their infrastructure into something powered by automation. Through careful monitoring of their metrics, they discovered that their partnership with Salesforce helped them achieve:

• A 769% ROI
• Savings of up to $200,000 per year
• An increase in staff work time efficiency by up to 70%

Supply chain visibility is a rapidly evolving process. And while there are already existing mechanisms and strategies in place to help businesses achieve this, we’re almost certain to see continuous improvements in the tech over the next few years.

Predictive models and simulations are becoming incredibly nuanced, to the point where businesses are now able to create what are known as digital twins. These virtual replicas of existing supply chains will allow businesses to simulate a vast swathe of scenarios and prepare for every eventuality.

Automation will continue to gather pace, with autonomous drones taking their place within supply chains to speed up routes. Warehouses are also undergoing a revolution, with robotics becoming increasingly common and used to keep track of inventory levels.

And it won’t be long before smart sensors become a mandatory part of wide-scale supply chains. They’ll play a crucial part in real-time tracking and monitoring of goods, particularly perishable goods. They’ll be able to sense shifts in humidity and temperature and alert businesses when stock is at risk of weather volatility or natural expiration.

Effective supply chain visibility is likely to become one of the most important operations that a business can implement. As we continue to expand global interconnectivity and businesses continue to scale at a rapid rate, supply chain logistics will only become more complex. That’s why businesses must adapt their business infrastructure so that end-to-end visibility becomes possible; otherwise, they risk being left behind.

True supply chain visibility can only be achieved through enhanced signals and clean, value-driven data. At Salesforce, we specialise in bringing together all of your digital supply chain functionality under one roof. With our Data Cloud software, businesses can master their supply chain data and turn it into something that will lead to effective decision-making and accurate forecasting.

And with our Agentforce platform, you’ll have full access to the big picture, with complete visibility on all operations and the ability to automate many of the time-consuming tasks that will often slow a supply chain down.

Contact us today to request a demo or to connect with our experts for a tailored roadmap to winning supply chain visibility.