Few people outside the supply chain function used to care where products came from. Nowadays, everyone from company leaders to interest groups to consumers wants to know something, if not everything, about a product’s origins. Steve New, of Oxford University, explores the technology, logistics, and inevitable opportunities and risks involved in exposing your supply chain to the world.
The new tools for making supply chains transparent are proliferating. They range from sand-grain-size radio-frequency ID tags embedded in products, to customer-facing online databases that allow any comer to probe a product’s history, to webcams that show what’s going on at suppliers in real time.
Managing such information so that it’s accurate, useful, and secure is no small task. But complex as the logistics may be, the benefits to a company are often well worth the effort. Transparency, if wisely marketed, can win the confidence of consumers who are inclined to buy your products and even that of potentially hostile interest groups. An unfettered, granular view into your own operations can also help you identify problems and, ultimately, strengthen the efficiency and integrity of your supply chain.
Nonetheless, power that’s so accessible can easily be wrested from a company. Leaders must remain on top of the vast wells of supply chain information at their fingertips so that they can analyze—and then wisely reveal—what they find before outsiders do.
Revealing Technologies
Driven by growing calls for transparency, firms such as Wal-Mart, Tesco, and Kroger are beginning to use new technologies to provide provenance data to the marketplace. In time, customers will perceive easy access to such information as the norm. Revealing origins will become an essential part of establishing trust and securing reputation.
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The key technologies