Leveraging supply chain visibility for responsiveness: The moderating role of internal integration

As global supply chains compete in an increasingly complex and rapidly changing business environment, supply chain responsiveness has become a highly prized capability. To increase responsiveness, supply chain managers often seek information that provides greater visibility into factors affecting both demand and supply. Managers often claim, however, that they are awash in data yet lacking in valuable information. Taken together, these conditions suggest that supply chain visibility is a necessary, but insufficient capability for enabling supply chain responsiveness. Based on organizational information processing theory, we posit that a supply chain organization's internal integration competence provides complementary information processing capabilities required to yield expected responsiveness from greater supply chain visibility. An analysis of data from 206 firms strongly supports this hypothesis. For supply chain managers, these findings indicate that a strategy for achieving supply chain responsiveness requires a dual-pronged approach that aligns increased visibility with extensive information processing capabilities from internal integration. For researchers, this study provides an initial examination of visibility as a construct, and extends a growing literature addressing integration as an information processing capability.