The Importance of Real-Time Visibility Into Your Service Supply Chain Workflows

Real-time visibility opens the door to a world of smoother operations, happier customers, and cost savings that greatly benefit your service organization — and influence its current and future states. This holistic visibility is critical to a successful Service Supply Chain. Observing and monitoring can give you key insights that influence how to continuously improve operations. Real-time visibility is especially important when the challenges facing supply chains today can make forecasting demand, purchasing inventory, and distributing it within a network incredibly costly.

If you can’t measure it, and you can’t monitor it, you can’t manage it.

Challenges Within a Service Supply Chain

Service Supply Chains face many complex challenges across internal and external initiatives. With so many systems, vendors, and partners reliant on each other, it’s crucial to ensure the workflow operates smoothly. Let’s take a look at a few of the top challenges Service Supply Chains face.

Resource Constraints

We’re seeing an abundance of environments with resource constraints within the current supply chain landscape. These limitations are being felt in talent, human resources, investments, and time. Limitations and resource constraints can cause major disruptions in delivering and meeting your customers’ expectations. However, the faster you’re able to gain clarity and see actionable insights through the data presented to you, the more effectively you can problem-solve these issues before they become bigger problems.

Failure to Meet Commitments

Service organizations are constantly trying to deliver orders with tight Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Failure to meet these contractual commitments drives frustration for every party involved. It drives frustration for the service delivery organization, to the partners in the delivery process due to unnecessary pressure, and certainly to the client whose expectations on targets are not being met.

Human-driven Processes and Errors

Humans are prone to errors, and as your workflows become more complex and start exceeding the capacity of operations and planning teams, the potential for errors rises. These errors can be felt through all aspects of the interaction and can lead to process slowdowns, the inability to stick to designated timeframes, and order backlogs that then need to be managed. The potential for errors extends to data inputs, data transfers across applications where there are swivel chair processes, and errors on human-owned decisions which can drive up unnecessary spend.

Here are a few examples of how human error can drive up cost:

• Choosing to expedite an order when standard shipping will still get it there on time
• Duplicating orders for the same customer request
• Missing critical inputs that are needed to complete a delivery, which creates the need for a second visit

Sustainability Concerns

Now more than ever, sustainability in the supply chain is a priority for many service organizations. Companies are actively working to go green and take measures that are good for the environment. But, the more problems that must be dealt with and the sloppier the execution, the higher the carbon footprint.

Challenges like these can significantly slow down operations and increase unnecessary costs. Having full visibility into the inner workings of what’s taking place from point A to B to C gives you the insights needed to stop problems before they occur, reduce human error, and manage processes so that customer expectations are met — and exceeded.

The Importance of Real-time Visibility

Expedited Problem-Solving

Real-time visibility provides you with key data for preventative action. Being able to view operational insights instantly helps you discover problems sooner so you can correct them faster. Finding out upfront that an order is missing your recipient’s phone number or contact information is much better than finding out when the shipment is not delivered.

Meeting Client Expectations

By knowing about a problem upfront, you can still work to meet your contractual commitments. If an order is placed with a tight delivery target, real-time tracking of inventory changes and netting can show you that a certain part ordered is not in stock in one warehouse, but is in another.

Reliability of Data

Manual processes can lead to dirty data. Automatic data tracking ensures that your data is always clean and correct no matter how many sources it’s from. Having advanced analytics at your fingertips offers the ability to solve problems faster and make informed, strategic decisions for the future of your organization.

Proactive Inventory Management

Reliable data leads to reliable decision-making. With trusted data on the elements within your operations, you can proactively make decisions that will benefit your organization and help you achieve your end goals faster. This leads to easier and more precise decisions more often than not.

Real-time Alerts

Getting an instant alert when an item is out of stock, in another location, or if there is an order problem helps expedite the necessary actions that take place after. Real-time alerts empower you to prioritize problems so your time is always used correctly and prioritization decisions are made intentionally. These alerts could be the difference between an order arriving on target or missing it.

Sustainable Practices

Better control of execution within your service parts management and the ability to improve and optimize operations help lower your organization’s carbon footprint. These seemingly small measures add up to create significant cost savings off your bottom line. Potential partners are also looking for businesses that are eco-friendly and take active steps to reduce unnecessary time, travel, and effort. The insights provided by real-time visibility into your workflow improve these sustainability measures within your organization.

Benefits of Real-Time Visibility

• Earlier Detection and Response
• On-time Commitments
• Proactive Inventory Management
• Reliability of Data
• Real-time Actionable Alerts
• Sustainable Practices

Solving for the Service Supply Chain