What's the single biggest challenge of supply chain management? Well, it depends on your view of the business. Webalo believes it's the end to end visibility of the supply chain--in other words, understanding the cause and effect of activities that may occur to impact supply chain performance: whether it's insufficient incoming supply, unexpected performance within manufacturing (low yields, quality issues, equipment downtime) or problems downstream (within the warehouse or in transportation--either orders not being delivered, or incorrect orders being shipped).  

Webalo has been working closely with the food and beverage industry for several years, and we've noticed a definitive move to them evaluating and adopting digital technologies for increased efficiencies in their supply chain.  A lot of the focus is on what we call the Frontline Worker--those task workers that are directly involved with the process, from the planning through execution of the product manufacturing through the delivery--ie, the entire value chain.

The best tools and practices for better data visibility & monitoring are highly dependent upon the environment upon which you are working.  Looking at the 'real-time' world of manufacturing operations, the needs within this area are to provide context (meaning) to the data so that workers or management can make decisions based upon the results or outcome.