ABSTRACT
Supply chain visibility has broad multidisciplinary roots, much like its parent field supply chain management. The theoretical basis and supporting academic research on supply chain visibility is therefore wider than it is deep. Supply chain visibility, at its earliest stage of usage, was simply the notion that information about the global supply chain would lead to better local supply chain decisions, a notion so basic it’s practically at the core of supply chain management itself (Storey and Emberson, 2001). Classic supply chain failures such as the Forrester (or “bullwhip”) effect derive directly from the lack of global information when making local decisions such as production or inventory level setting (Lee, Padmanabhan, and Whang, 1997).
