If we were to turn back the dial of time by about a couple hundred years, we might see that the transportation of goods was a pretty adventurous and risky affair for the most part. If someone that was living in England at the time wanted to buy spices, they needed to wait for a ship to arrive from the Indian colonies owned by the empire. These ships took months to arrive, and even that was a major improvement because of the fact that such journeys might have taken years in centuries prior to this point on the timeline.
The most pertinent issue with such supply chains was that no one involved in the transactions were able to keep an eye on the goods and stay updated on their security. Most healthcare logistics companies would crumble into a heap if such supply chains still existed, and that is the best explanation of the importance of supply chain visibility that we can think of at this moment. A visible supply chain is one that allows manufacturers, retailers and consumers to keep track of products and raw materials, and global positioning satellites have made that possible thanks to their wide reaching overhead views.
Containers that are placed on gargantuan cargo ships can allow thousands of tons of goods to be transported all at once, so suffice it to say that making sure that all of the goods are safe and sound is crucial since they represent so much value. A single delayed shipment can send the whole market as well as the wider economy into a veritable tailspin, so making the chain completely visible is vital for defending the world from such mishaps.
