The Visibility Council: A New Model for Digitizing Supply Chain Operations

by Mahesh Veerina

I’m excited to share that we recently joined a new supply chain transformation coalition called The Visibility Council, as one of the founding members. The Council is a community of supply chain executives, technology innovators, thought leaders from industry and academia brought together to accelerate the creation and adoption of the next generation digital supply chain.

Over the next six months, Visibility Council members will work together in cross-industry teams to pool insights, perspectives and resources to identify the most burgeoning needs and develop collaborative frameworks for addressing these needs.

Designed as a working group, the Visibility Council includes notable supply chain leaders from companies such as Colgate-Palmolive, Microsoft and Roche, thought leader and Stanford Professor Dr. Hau Lee and veteran supply chain chiefs with experience leading supply chain transformations from Accenture, Cisco, Intel and AT&T.

Our meeting in January connected many of the dots laid out in previous Visibility Council conversations. Here are a few takeaways from previous Visibility Council meetings:

• Build your transformation roadmap to align with the enterprise vision and objectives, and commercial-side growth goals. Align your initiatives with growth to create business-side pull capabilities.
• By involving your extended leadership team in the transformation visioning and road mapping exercises, you will get better insights into ground-level realities, as well as buy-in to the transformational activities.
• Start with a solid foundation. Before jumping into your transformation, spend the time and effort to ensure that you have properly built your foundation, focusing on data infrastructure/data governance, leadership/organizational structure, and cultural alignment with the broader organization.

All of us on the Visibility Council believe that there is no better time to push for collective transformation in supply chain networks. Digitizing supply chains, already one of the most critical cogs in the global economy, has become even more crucial in the recent year. Coming together to accelerate this movement is the goal of The Visibility Council.

This is an extraordinary point in time where we have the ability to fast-track the industry-wide digital transformation of the supply chain. The vision and industry experience within the Council, combined with the generous sharing of ideas, technology innovations and best practices, will result in a massive shift in how next-generation supply chains are designed and operated, benefiting all industries. I’m looking forward to sharing with you some of our key insights over the coming months.

To learn more about the Visibility Council, please visit https://visibilitycouncil.com/ and follow them on LinkedIn.