ABSTRACT
Supply chain visibility started out as an ambiguous synonym for the quality or quantity of information access or sharing in the supply chain. Typical usages of the term in the 1980s or early 1990s were along the lines of “that company has a high degree of visibility to their upstream inventory.” By the late 1990s a new definition was taking hold, one that assumed that supply chain visibility was a solution rather than a quality to be measured. Publications and conference presentations leveraged the new definition in phrases like “an important addition to your supply chain visibility.” Although the term’s meaning hasn’t shifted as profoundly since the late 1990s, it remained ambiguous and variously defined by later researchers or practitioners.
