How to Build Trust in a Supply Chain? - Blog

Over the past few years, global supply chains have experienced unprecedented volatility, embattled by an ongoing pandemic, geo-political crisis, operational disruptions, and legacy models. The agility and robustness of supply chains have unavoidably skyrocketed to the top of the C-Suite minds.

Trust is critical in ensuring improved supply chain resiliency and business continuity. Trust in supply chain data. Trust in the transparency of all stakeholders. Trust in an organization’s ability to trace supply chain performance—and make more appropriate decisions to future-proof supply chain dynamics.

According to the Observer Research Foundation, the “contours of global supply chains will be shaped by the evolving understanding of ‘trust.’” In the overall supply chain conversation, the notion of trust is leading to dominant paradigm shifts in economic and political spheres. In addition to transactional and collaborative trust, building trusted supply chains now also hinges on technology trust—or the necessity of leveraging reliable modern solutions to increase data accuracy, visibility and timeliness.

Blog - How to Build Trust in a Supply Chain? It Starts With Data

OBSTACLES TO ACHIEVING SUPPLY CHAIN TRUST AND RESILIENCE

McKinsey & Company’s recent report estimated that a single prolonged supply chain shock could wipe out 30 to 50% of a business’ one-year earnings before interest, taxes, and appreciation. In the same report, the firm purports that the way to build resilience is to manage supply chains more proactively. And part of that proactiveness comes from increasing data sharing with suppliers.

OPTEL’s and Chief Technology Officer, Florent Bouguin, Eng, M.Sc., recently wrote, as a member of the Forbes Technology Council, that proactive supply chain visibility is still sunk in a quagmire of siloed and dated data as well as information systems that don’t speak to each other.

Statistics from a Talend study confirm that executives are feeling deeply concerned about the state of their organizations’ data health. Fully 97% admitted that their companies are dealing with challenges using data effectively. Forty-six percent don’t deem that their data has the speed and flexibility to satisfy business demands.

ACCELERATING SUPPLY CHAIN TRUST WITH MODERN SUPPLY CHAIN TRACEABILITY SYSTEMS

As Bouguin points out in another Forbes article, entitled How To Accelerate Supply Chain Digitalization And Resilience With Better Trust In Data, confidence in supply chain data starts with confidence in its precision and accuracy. This can only be attained with end-to-end traceability platforms providing access to real-time information from all stakeholders in an interconnected supply chain network.

As supply chain technologies continue to evolve, Gartner predicts that within the next three to five years, industries will experience an “increase in the adoption of digital supply chain technologies […] and more IT-focused roles.” The end goal is inevitably to streamline supply chain workflows and actionable data exchange so that actors can pre-emptively identify potential problems before they arise and quickly implement mitigation strategies.

Infusing supply chains with new levels of agility and reliability is a business imperative that will not show any signs of abating, particularly as global, multi-faceted trade continues to grow. Data, along with the traceability technologies that enable it to flow both downstream and upstream, will allow companies to unlock impactful supply chain resilience. Furthermore, with more agile supply chains, businesses can generate better bottom-line results and outperform the competition.

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