Supply Chain Visibility: From Theory to Practice

Transparency and accurate management information are essential if you want to ensure that the supply chain is working for your business. Supply Chain Visibility is a critical primer for readers with backgrounds in supply chain management, system integration, strategy consulting, and enterprise software.

Jonah McIntire sets the stage for a new framework that empowers business leaders to connect their projects, tasks or work streams back to the strategic message that it is worth applying organizational resources to supply chain visibility. Drawing on research findings, he reviews the prerequisites needed for a successful visibility solution and suggests a visibility fitness scorecard to compare the quality of widely varying approaches. The second section of the book reviews in detail the eight most common types of supply chain visibility and offers a set of indicators of potential fit for each one. The book also explains how to acquire visibility technology and the available options, and includes guidance on best practice for in-house designed systems.

If you or your organization are moving into this area, Jonah’s insights will place you in a far stronger position to decide exactly how to leverage the benefits of supply chain visibility solutions; they also walk you carefully through the minefields of ineffective approaches or technologies to give you the greatest chance of success.

About the Author

Jonah McIntire conceived and developed the framework proposed in this book after years of deep focus on the subject of supply chain visibility and realizing that newcomers to the field were at a disadvantage due to the low volume and uncoordinated nature of the published work on the topic. Jonah is a co-founder of Clear Abacus, a cloud-computing transport planning and optimization solution, a company combining cutting edge computing and supply chain expertise. Prior to founding Clear Abacus his career in the supply chain field spanned consulting, product management, change management, supply chain information systems, process re-engineering, and outsourcing. He has a broad global perspective, having lived or executed major supply chain projects over the last decade in: Denmark, France, the UK, Japan, China, Singapore, Switzerland, the USA, and Canada. In the area of supply chain visibility, Jonah's experience includes system selection and deployment for a major retailer, solution and integration consulting as a software vendor, IT product management for a logistics service provider, and periodic publications, presentations, and interviews on the subject.