The Benefits Of 360 Degree Supply Chain Visibility

Meeting unpredictable food and beverage market demands can be made much easier with 360 degree oversight of your supply chain. For retailers and suppliers, greater supply chain visibility means greater control over the flow of products and payments through your business. 

And all encompassing B2B payment solutions offer this necessary transparency, helping you improve efficiency and productivity in the entire sales process. 

4 Advantages of supply chain visibility

This blog post will reveal key advantages of the supply chain visibility, and how modern solutions enforce it to improve your business operations.

1. Mitigate Risk to Your Business

Inventory shrink and mismanagement, whether due to clerical errors, goods being damaged or lost, or theft, is a problem for every retail establishment in the food and beverage industry -- and it’s getting worse. Studies show that inventory shrink cost US businesses over $61.7 billion in 2019, up from $50.6 billion the year before. And in the fiscal year of 2020, over 15% of US retailers experienced inventory shrink rates of three percent and higher. 

Fighting inventory risk and shrink will always be a battle for retailers and suppliers. But solutions that offer 360-degree visibility of deliveries, credits, sales and inventory counts mitigate risk, as retailers and suppliers can track and monitor all their generated data.

Furthermore, supply chain visibility means you can create systems that reduce the number of exchanges that money has to go through – decreasing the possibility of fraud or theft. For large businesses, loopholes and inefficiencies in billing and payment processes can amount to staggering losses if left unchecked.

SEE ALSO: 6 Reasons to Go Mobile With Your B2B Payments

2. Eliminate Endless Paper Trails 

Let’s imagine that, even without the advantages of full supply chain visibility, you’ve detected worrying irregularities in your company’s inventory or finances. What steps would you take to rectify the situation? Without a centralized data platform, you’ll be forced to chase down complex paper trails to identify how discrepancies are occuring within your business.

This is time-consuming and expensive, and often requires hired external expertise to trace all activity among your staff, vendors and any other partners. Complex, paper-heavy processes mask dishonest actions and trending mistakes, delaying any investigation into them and costing you large sums of money over time.

3. Prevent Human Error 

Even when irregularities are not malicious, they are still costly. Human errors, such as forgetting to sign checks, incorrectly counting money, or improperly managing inventory, are all known causes of money leaking out of the register.

B2B payment solutions that offer the advantage of supply chain visibility mitigate these mistakes by helping you to make the switch to mobile transactions. Whether you’re a retailer or a supplier, you’ll gain a live, comprehensive view of your stock and cash flow – and become empowered to address any issues as soon as they arise.

4. Access to Your Information When You Want It 

Storing digital financial records on a central database means instant access to your data when you need it. No delays while files are ‘dug up’ and no risk of important financial data getting lost. Audits can be completed timeously and transparently, while cash flow is managed more efficiently.

Digitizing your financial information also satisfies many of the food and beverage regulatory requirements around how data should be organized and shared within the business and beyond. It’s also often too easy for unauthorized people to access filing cabinets or mishandle financial records in hard copy - digitizing it makes managing it a far simpler task.

How Do I Increase My Supply Chain Visibility?

Given the advantages of supply chain visibility, it’s unsurprising that companies are turning to easy, reliable B2B software solutions like iControl to give them a 360 degree data overview of their trading affairs. Check out our recent blog to learn more about how technology optimizes supply chain partnerships and their payment processes.