Visibility over the location of product in your supply chain would appear to be a basic principle of logistics management. But if that's the case, why are so many companies still struggling to identify what is moving or at rest, where and when?

The answer has been puzzling practitioners, academics, and consultants alike for years. Our take is that the prospect of achieving supply chain visibility hinges on three factors: internal processes, external coordination, and technology.

The first step in knowing the whereabouts of your inventory is to get your internal house in order. In too many cases one department does not really know what the other is doing in terms of inventory management.

When everyone in the organization is working off the same set of procedures for reporting inventory movements, the chances of getting an accurate read on inventory improve dramatically. This kind of internal integration needs to be driven from the top to avoid the turf battles that otherwise would surely rage.

But getting your internal house in order is only part of the deal. Products spend much of their life cycle outside of your internal domain—on ocean carriers, in trucks, in public warehouses, at suppliers' facilities, and so on. So if you're going to achieve true inventory visibility, you have to bring these supply chain partners into the picture. This means developing collaborative procedures for capturing and exchanging information on the movement of goods. That's where the third factor, technology, comes into play.

Once the internal and external procedures are in place for managing inventory, companies can acquire the technology that makes visibility possible. Note that the processes are put in place before the technology is implemented, not the other way around. How many times have companies laid out big money for shipment tracking or event management software only to find that, yes, they now have greater visibility, but it's visibility over incomplete or inaccurate inventory information?

Achieving visibility over inventory flow (including those troublesome "blind spots" discussed in the article on Page 49) is within the grasp of logistics professionals. Recognizing the key factors that go into that effort makes the reach a little easier.