Supply Chain Visibility Is The Killer App for Finance

For years, operations teams have championed visibility as their next breakthrough tool for efficiency. That’s true enough; when you can see where your stuff is — across time zones, suppliers, and partners — you can make better decisions about how much you need, where it should be and how to keep it all moving towards the customer.

Yet, while ops teams have built impressive capabilities with software platforms, partner data sharing and real-time Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, they may not realize the power those systems also have to revolutionize finance. Morgan Global Logistics Managing Director John Hoyt and Chris Cauley, Head of Inventory Management Sales at Taulia (an SAP company), made the case for this radically expanded vision this week at the Supply Chain Digitization 2022 conference.

Their presentation, “Bits, Boxes, and The Bottom Line,” showed emerging best practices for using ops visibility triggers to drive financial processes. One example Hoyt cited: Shipment delivery events fed into an engine that understands title transfer Incoterms can automate revenue recognition. It can take days for teams of people to manually track events and decode which ones entitle the finance team to post revenue for each sale. Software platforms like ChronosCloud accelerate that transaction to an instant, however. As a result, balance sheets look stronger, and auditing becomes easier and more trackable.

Cauley’s company has emerged as a leader in supply chain “FinTech” by finding ways like this to align operations and finance teams. Traditionally, procurement and ops teams prioritize continuous availability of goods. In other words, no stock-outs, ever. Finance just wants stronger balance sheets. New financial tools for inventory management, driven by tech, can resolve that standoff. In some cases, an additional “buffer” of goods can even be created at minimal cost by completely outsourcing inventory ownership, as with Morgan’s Inventory On Demand service. 

Industry leaders have begun to key on these solutions. Taulia’s tech-driven inventory management solutions account for more than $40 billion in annual managed supply chain flow, encompassing suppliers in more than 168 countries and over 1 million daily supplier interactions.

Interested in extending your visibility into inventory management and finance?

View the entire “Bits, Boxes, and the Bottom Line” presentation.

DOES INVENTORY COST KEEP YOU FROM MAKING GOOD DECISIONS? 

What if you didn't have to worry about the cost of inventory?