In today’s supply chain landscape, mere supply chain visibility isn’t enough for any business involved. And the reason is quite simple. Visibility alone cannot drive business value. The difference between success and stagnation lies not in seeing your supply chain, but in how quickly you can act on what you see.
The 2024 research from Accenture reveals that next-gen supply chain businesses have already adopted tech solutions with 23% profit increase. Yet a lot of late movers are still lagging behind.
The Visibility Paradox
With supply chain visibility having become table stakes, many companies still struggle with fragmented systems and delayed decision-making. What I’d like to put a heightened focus on here in this article is addressing visibility issues via tech optimization.
As it is revealed in Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2025, the adoption of intelligence solutions across business pipelines contributes greatly to getting new business benefits. The report states that tech integration enables low-cost, real-time tracking and sensing of items, improving visibility and performance. This said, we are witnessing an ever-growing adoption rate that looks quite promising for the supply chain industry. It underscores the growing recognition of the importance of real-time data in making informed decisions and improving operational efficiency.
The Growing Complexity Challenge
Customer expectations have evolved dramatically nowadays, when next-day delivery is no longer a competitive advantage but a baseline expectation.
To add insult to injury, today’s customers are all for reliability as well, not just blink-of-an-eye delivery times. McKinsey research found customers are excited about the idea of receiving their order on the same day. But they seem to be more interested in accurate delivery tracking. In general, reliability may be more important to lots of consumers than speed of delivery.
In Germany, as the research above revealed, consumers are more interested in knowing exactly when their shipment will arrive than in having it arrive on the same day. They are willing to pay a higher premium for a service that allows them to track their shipment and give them accurate information about when it will arrive, within two hours.
The Real-Time Data Advantage
Harnessing real-time data to gain more business value is just the right thing to do in the coming 2025. The idea of how advanced technology can help businesses has been in the air among scholars and practitioners for a while. Peter Weill, the chairman of MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research (CISR), puts a high emphasis on integrating generative AI and other tech solutions for businesses seeking to thrive in the digital age. Weill underscored the powerful results of this approach, observing that the companies he studied, which function in real-time, enjoy 97% greater profits and 62% faster growth than their industry peers. The critical factor, he pointed out, is removing inefficiencies such as repeatedly revisiting decisions and depending on legacy systems. The challenges often seen in companies that don’t operate in real time.
So, the question isn’t whether to integrate your supply chain management systems. It’s how to do it in a way that delivers measurable business value. With tech-enabled solutions on board, businesses gain benefits in a variety of areas:
- Inventory Optimization
Modern inventory management isn’t just about reducing stock levels – it’s about having the right inventory at the right time. The insights gained from real-time data allow supply chain managers for:
- Dynamic safety stock adjustments
- Automated reordering based on actual demand
- Predictive stock positioning
- Workforce Efficiency
Automation transfers repetitive, routine tasks from people to software, often resulting in improved customer experiences, reduced error rates, enhanced compliance, and lower stress for teams. In a nutshell, real-time workforce management transforms how teams operate through:
- Automated task allocation
- Dynamic workload balancing
- Predictive labor planning
Also, Harvard Business Review found out that automation tools also positively impact the employee experience. Nearly 90% reported greater job satisfaction after adopting the technology, and 84% felt more satisfied with their employer. Reducing burnout and enhancing work-life balance through automation are essential retention strategies for companies navigating an evolving labor market.
- Transportation Optimization
Another great thing to keep in mind is increasing logistics and transportation efficiency, as it has a big impact on a company’s earnings. With cutting-edge technologies, businesses can meet consumer needs for more reliable and quicker deliveries. In other words, integrating an industry-specific software worth its salt is a real asset to your business. Yet another fact to prove what’s said above is the route optimization software market value, projected to reach nearly $13M by 2030.
So, what’s for supply chain businesses? Here you can capitalize on the following:
- Dynamic routing adjustments
- Real-time load optimization
- Predictive maintenance scheduling
- Customer Experience Enhancement
That’s an open secret that forward-looking businesses leverage a data-driven approach to create customer-centric supply chains. Speaking of it, a group of industry experts from Deloitte came up with some interesting insights. In today’s market, every mature supply chain should gather data to understand consumer behavior and measure performance against expectations. This approach enables a supply chain to:
- Deepen insights into demand signals that inform forecasting and logistics
- Track shifts in consumer behavior, demand, and consumption patterns
- Identify new or adjacent market opportunities and partnerships, especially in response to unexpected trends or spending patterns
- Design, develop, and launch new offerings while supporting both internal and external business cases
In turn, this improvement is attributed to better order accuracy, faster delivery times, and improved customer experiences.
Here’re some more use cases. Automated real-time solutions transform customer relationships from reactive to proactive through:
- Immediate status updates
- Proactive disruption notifications
- Dynamic delivery window adjustments
Final Thought
In today’s fast-moving supply chain environment, the ability to act quickly on real-time information isn’t just a competitive advantage. It’s becoming a requirement for survival. Leading companies are already seeing significant returns on their integration investments after having adopted software solutions for supply chain management custom-built to meet the industry-specific business needs.
This is more than just a technology upgrade – it’s a fundamental shift in how your supply chain operates. The companies that embrace this change and execute it well will find themselves not just surviving but thriving in the increasingly complex supply chain landscape of tomorrow.
About the author
Dmitry Shcherba is the PR & Comms Manager at Erbis, a software development company, with over ten years of experience covering technology topics. He, specializes in sharing insights into how supply chain and legal tech businesses can leverage innovations to safeguard infrastructure, enhance efficiency and profitability.
