Production Logistics Visibility – Perspectives, Principles and Prospects

Globalisation, competitive markets and increasing sustainability requirements are demanding companies to focus on visibility to improve their supply chains and ultimately their businesses. This paper aims to identify perspectives, principles and prospects of production logistics visibility (PLV). The study is based on a literature review of articles presenting definitions, development trends and the future role of PLV. It is concluded that visibility is generally defined by availability, quality, accessibility and usefulness of information. PLV could refer to the extent to which actors within the production systems have access to timely and accurate information considered useful to their operations. According to the findings, antecedents of PLV include digitalisation, IoT and connectivity. These steps are required to turn data into meaningful information that can be used for decision making in production and logistics setting to improve operational and business performance. Furthermore, to fully benefit from PLV, there has to be an integration of external and internal perspectives. Concluding, the paper defines future research efforts including four lines of exploration and development: (1) Intra-site visibility for material management including dynamic synchronisation, takt and resource planning. (2) Supply-oriented visibility for dynamic status and prediction of supply network status. These two initial lines of enquiry should include the perspectives of stakeholders, parameter, enabling technologies and potential impact. (3) A synthesised framework for Production Logistics Visibility, relying on utilizing antecedents and enabling multi-criteria decision in production logistics based on visibility, where performance in terms of efficiency, sustainability and flexibility is ensured. (4) To specifically detail and exploit the potential in production logistics visibility in the aspect of environmental sustainability and closed material and product loops.