In today’s retail sector, businesses need end to end visibility across their global, multi-tier, usually complex supply chains to stay competitive, compliant, and resilient.”
Supply Chain Visibility (SCV) provides real-time insights into the movement of materials, components, and products from sourcing to final delivery. By leveraging SCV, companies can optimise operations, reduce risks, and ensure compliance with evolving regulations.
Read on to discover:
- What is supply chain visibility?
- Why is supply chain visibility important?
- The business benefits of supply chain visibility
- Why you need supply chain visibility NOW
- Key components of supply chain visibility
- A real-life example showing why supply chain visibility software matters
- How Segura’s supply chain visibility solution works
What is supply chain visibility?
Supply chain visibility is the result of documenting the full extent of your multi-tier supply chain.
The aim of supply chain visibility is to provide stakeholders with access to accurate, up-to-date data, enabling smarter, more informed decision-making and a pathway to legislative and supplier compliance.
It’s achieved through the ability to capture, track and monitor supply chain data, including your supplier network, materials, components, and products throughout the supply chain—from sourcing to final delivery. By monitoring materials, components, and shipments in real-time, businesses gain valuable insights that help them optimise operations, mitigate risks, and ensure compliance.
Why is supply chain visibility important?
Supply chain visibility is essential for maintaining efficiency, compliance and customer trust.
It enables businesses achieve regulatory compliance, as companies must adhere to new legislation that requires disclosure such as CSDDD or ESPR and the EU Digital Product Passport, which is coming in 2025. See our legislation matrix to find out what your fashion retailer or brand will be facing this year.
Secondly, supply chain visibility can help mitigate risks by identifying disruptions before they escalate.
Additionally, modern consumers expect transparency in shipping, ethical sourcing, and environmental impact, making visibility a critical component of brand reputation.
Lastly, operational efficiency improves with better supply chain insights, allowing businesses to optimise inventory, reduce waste, and cut unnecessary costs.
The Business benefits of supply chain visibility
Supply chain visibility (SCV) offers significant advantages across various business functions, enabling companies to operate more efficiently and competitively. Let’s look at the business teams who are the beneficiaries of SCV software and how it helps meet business goals.
Risk management teams – can proactively identify potential disruptions, mitigating delays and financial losses before they escalate.
Compliance and legal teams – rely on SCV to track supplier adherence to industry regulations and sustainability standards, ensuring ethical and legal accountability.
CSR & Sustainability teams – use visibility tools to identify sustainable sourcing opportunities, verify social and environmental claims, and support responsible buyer-supplier relations.
Supplier relationships – are strengthened and more profitable due to greater transparency and trust.
Marketing teams – benefit from the verified provenance of the products being sold to consumers, avoid greenwashing and have a positive story to tell.
Furthermore, supply chain visibility can reduce costs by minimising inefficiencies, lowering logistics expenses, and preventing overstocking. Increased visibility provides greater agility, enabling businesses to quickly adapt to market fluctuations or unexpected supply chain disruptions. Finally, SCV enhances the customer experience by enabling greater transparency around the provenance of items purchased and sustainability information.
Why you need supply chain visibility Now: The devil is in the detail!
Board level demand for Supply Chain Visibility Software will arise according to situation. Primarily in 2025 this is about supply chain legislative compliance, as much as risk management or tracking orders.
I've included a few simplified examples below of legislation that requires supply chain visibility to enable compliance, and failure to comply will result in penalties.
Businesses are under obligation to report and disclose information if your company:
- trades in France with a turnover above €50m (French environmental labelling law)
- trades in the EU with a turnover above €150m (Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive)
- trades in Norway with a turnover over NOK 70 million (Åpenhetsloven – aka Norway's Supply Chain Transparency Act)
- trades in the USA with good originating in North West China (Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act)
- wants to make 'green claims' about your products in the UK (The Green Claims Code enforced by the Competition and Market Authority)
- trades in the EU (then you need to be prepared for the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation and Digital Product Passport by 2026. The ESPR applies to all products placed on the EU market, impacting manufacturers, importers, and distributors across industries with no size exemptions at present).
From this handful of regulations, you can see the triggers to force businesses to get supply chain visibility are coming from different angles, be it sustainability, human rights or consumer trust.
For a more complete view of what legislation will apply to your business, I recommend downloading our Legislation Matrix and any of our factsheets to help you navigate the nitty gritty. But overall, these legislative acts are coming in multiple ways, so you'll definitely need to be able to disclose robust information to authorities about activities and materials in your supply chain at some point in the next few years.
Key Components of Supply Chain Visibility
Supply chain visibility is often used with related terms like supply chain mapping, visualisation, traceability, and transparency. Believe it or not, all these terms mean slightly different things!
The goal - Supply Chain Visibility – comprises several component concepts and terms, which are often used interchangeably, but we've done our best to define them in the table below:
|
Component |
What is it? |
Business Benefits |
|
Supply Chain Mapping (1st step to achieve supply chain visibility) |
Identifies all suppliers and subcontractors across multiple tiers (a map of the supply chain in its entirety) It’s the foundation on which other activities take place, e.g. undertaking supplier risk assessments, or identifying supply chain efficiencies. Mapping comprises order sourcing, manufacturing, logistics, warehousing and all the touchpoints involved in producing a product and delivery. |
Combines various sets of data – from spreadsheets, databases, reports, orders & audits – into a central system that is accessible to stakeholders. Ability to capture supplier, compliance and supply chain data in one place. Enables compliance, risk and CSR teams to produce actionable reports. For example, businesses working towards sustainable sourcing can risk assess & prioritise suppliers. Confirming supplier locations helps prevent unauthorised subcontracting and prepare contingency plans for disruptions like natural disasters. |
|
Supply Chain Visualisation |
A visual representation of supplier relationships and operations. |
Gives senior executives a top-down view to assess efficiency, allocate resources, identify risks, run scenarios and make predictions. Leads to more dynamic business with reduced vulnerability to major supply chain disruptions. |
|
Supply Chain Traceability |
Tracks materials, components, and orders in real-time (from the Bill of Materials through to delivery). Once your supply chain is mapped, it’s then possible to achieve traceability with the ability to track your orders as they are placed with suppliers and move along the supply chain. |
Allows retailers to be responsive to real-time events, such as supply and demand issues, problems with logistics and delivery delays. Retailers can report on the provenance of their product and its components, and combine this with 3rd party verification of materials sourced. |
|
Supply Chain Transparency |
Having full visibility of the supply chain so that it can be disclosed publicly if required or desired. Business leaders decide what information they release, to whom, when and how that should be done. These decisions will be forced by increasing legislation on retailers, such as the EU Digital Product Passport, and eco-labelling already enforced in the French Market. |
Improve brand reputation amongst all stakeholders: employees, suppliers and communities. Helps businesses avert the risk of public criticism, crisis management costs and regulator fines or penalties. Ultimately this will increase business health, build stronger teams and create loyal customers, which will increase shareholder value. |
Real-World Example: Why Supply Chain Visibility Matters
A global fashion retailer who uses supply chain visibility software to track its products from raw material sourcing to store shelves has an advantage over competitors. With real-time data, the company can monitor shipments, identify delays, and ensure ethical sourcing compliance.
For example, when Ever Given, the ultra-large cargo ship, became stuck in the Suez Canal in 2021, many businesses were badly affected by consequent logistical delays because the Suez Canal was blocked. Those retailers who had full visibility of the chain (specifically supply chain traceability) were able to tell if they had containers aboard the Ever Given or in transit along the Canal. If they were affected, they were able to re-route shipments or place replacement orders that could be dispatched as quickly as possible.
As you can see, this level of visibility improves efficiency, risk management, and customer satisfaction by ensuring products are delivered on time while meeting ethical and sustainability standards.
Segura’s Supply Chain Visibility Solution
Segura specialises in supply chain mapping, traceability, visualisation, and compliance reporting. Our cloud-based platform helps retailers and brands centralise their supply chain data, ensuring full transparency and efficiency.
To begin, Segura will help get your supply chain data in order! Our reporting tools and supplier scorecards will give you confidence in your data and help remedy any issues.
Our software can combine your wider supply chain data with auditing information, providing powerful insights.
Segura provides us with the transparency and traceability we need to ensure our supply chain is ethical, sustainable and efficient – essentially fit for the future. Segura allows us to measure our supply chain performance and ESG credentials, identify risk, and underpin our buying decisions with robust data. Segura’s built-in reporting tool means we can quickly and easily meet our reporting requirements without the overhead of managing multiple spreadsheets. Having the Segura platform is a big win for both our Sustainability efforts and our Buying teams and demonstrates our commitment made through River Island’s The Kind Society initiative.
Want to learn more? Please sign up to our mailing list to access exclusive white papers and webinars that break down evolving legislation and guide businesses on staying compliant in an ever-changing regulatory landscape.
You can also get in touch and we can arrange a demo of our software. See how Segura can help your business achieve ethical, sustainable, and efficient supply chain visibility.
About Segura
Segura Systems is a UK-based SaaS company enabling ethical, sustainable and efficient multi-tier supply chains.
Segura provides n-tier mapping, transparency, traceability, visualisation, compliance and reporting. Segura sits in the centre of your supply chain management structure creating a central repository for all your supply chain, ESG-related data and evidence, including from third-party data sources.
