The holiday season is a time of giving and receiving; UPS alone is anticipating delivering about 750 million packages. However, if you work in retail, it is also the unenviable time of mass returns and exchanges. According to the 2017 Consumer Returns in the Retail Industry report, “Total merchandise returns account for more than $351 billion in lost sales for US retailers.”

The modus operandi of the ‘sales process’ has changed over the years in both the B2B and B2C spheres; it has moved from being a largely offline to an online process and this transformation has also changed customer expectations vis-à-vis product delivery. 

Establishing maximum efficiency in your supply chain is vital in today’s customer-centric climate. The average consumer is only willing to wait a maximum of 4.5 days for delivery, down from 5.5 days in 2012, according to AlixPartners research. People spend time online researching products and identifying the best prices, but when they order, they expect things to arrive quickly, and to have visibility into its delivery status every step of the way.

The expectations of the average customer have changed a great deal in the last few years. People want products quickly and expect them to arrive in increasingly tight windows of time. Most businesses rely on a complex and disparate network of partners and software systems to fulfill their orders.

Agility has been a huge focus for organizations as we enter unpredictable waters of the current and future economy. Increasing customer expectations, global business challenges and digitization are greatly impacting how we market and sell our products and provide a high level customer experience through the supply chain. And agility is critical to sustained business success.

The definition of Supply chain visibility has evolved more than any other term in supply chain. From track and trace to multi-tier inventory, supply chain visibility is used to describe improvements in how we use data to track and make better decisions in our supply chain.

Today, we would like to talk about end-to-end supply chain visibility and how organizations are using supply chain orchestration in order to get real-time actionable visibility into the orders that are being executed throughout their end-to-end supply chains. This is key.

Last week, MPO and DSV co-presented on the webinar, "15 Critical Functions of Supply Chain Control Towers". As with every webinar we do we receive a whole host of insightful questions from the audience, many of which we answer on the webinar and the rest which we want to answer via our blog.

Here are the questions from the webinar and answers from our team of experts.

Digitization has changed everything. It’s changed not only how we interact but how we make decisions with readily available information. This accessibility to information and organizations has flattened the playing field for every organization as they look to market and sell their wares.

Supply chain networks and our ability to collaborate across them is becoming a critical core competency for successful supply chain operations. With more external parties and partners involved in helping us to deliver a positive customer experience through the supply chain, it’s critical that we evolve how we think about these parties, their impact on business success and how we consistently improve collaboration across them.

I was recently reading Adrian Gonzalez’s 2018 supply chain predictions on his Talking Logistics blog and I found myself nodding at many of his points. We live in a chaotic world where change is the only constant to our lives and we’re seeing that with the massive changes in business and the economy. Changes that will require a different approach to how we measure, connect and execute our supply chains.

In order to kick off 2018 on the right note, we wanted to look at 2017 on the most popular topics and most well read blog articles from our supply chain orchestration blog.

Supply chain visibility is a critical function of any modern (and competitively advantageous) supply chain. However, the term itself leads many leaders to focus just on the capture and display of supply chain data.

With today’s growing supply chain complexity, we’re seeing organizations struggle to deliver customer value with their supply chains at a cost that helps to make their business profitable.

It’s a huge problem that is getting more difficult by the day as organizations and supply chain professionals look for answers in their strategies and the technologies they use as the foundation for their supply chains. Oftentimes, the solution is not replacing the legacy systems they have in place but by connecting and extending them with a supply chain control tower.

We live in a “Now” economy with customers that are consistently expecting faster and faster delivery service levels with the same amount of care and in-full execution. However, doing so has become increasingly complex in the supply chain. Orders are coming in with greater variability due to more front-end options and the geographies we need to service with our supply chain are growing. So it’s not just about increased speed but increased speed with more tailored supply chains across increasingly expanding geographies.

As organizations move forward with determining how to transform their supply chains, it’s critical to understand that successful supply chains aren’t driven just by more investment into static resources but about agility in the way that we use our assets, investments and partners. The one constant we know is that business changes will happen and these changes will have a direct impact on our supply chains increasing the need to adjust and adapt quickly to drive cost efficient and customer focused practices.