“The earlier [you adopt visibility], the better positioned you’ll be when the next major sort of crisis happens” - interview with Eric Johnson, JOC

Key points‍

• Shippers may hesitate to adopt visibility due to perceived investment timing, market volatility, and uncertainty about long-term benefits.
• Adopting visibility now can position companies better for future crises, as early adoption allows for a longer learning process and better preparedness.
• Scenario planning is crucial, but many companies are still in the modeling phase and not yet acting on their plans.
• Long-term investment in visibility is essential, as it provides reliable, ongoing value rather than just transactional benefits.

Why might shippers hesitate to adopt visibility right now?

‍Eric Johnson (Senior Technology Editor, Journal of Commerce): Sometimes, it’s considered that you have a single shot over a period such as three, five or ten years to invest in something like visibility. 

There’s also a repeated market pattern, from a marketing perspective: expectations about a product are always slightly ahead of where the product actually is. 

Then there’s how the global context has evolved, since the first Trump tariffs in 2019. Clients now need as much information as they can possibly get, especially if it’s reasonably priced.

Uncertainty creates paralysis. Things changing all the time doesn’t create a great environment for people asking for long-term investment. So we know companies need visibility, but in environments like this, companies will hold on to their cash.

So why could now be the right time to adopt visibility?

You want to be making long-term decisions in a time of relative calm. But we’re so overloaded with information today, periods of calm don’t last long. The challenge for businesses is making calm decisions when everything seems so volatile. 

Perhaps one solution would be rather than waiting for that calm period, simply stepping aside to make this type of decision.

My pet theory is that this data overload leads to the observation effect, where the simple fact of observing affects the experiment… and not always positively.

Are you seeing more and more shippers engaged in scenario planning?

When tariffs hit, that was the first thing we asked shippers. It turns out they’re spending a decent amount of time developing ‘what if’ scenarios… and that costs money. Looking for other suppliers, working with consultants, attorneys and so on.

For example, they may ask ‘if we have a 70/30 split between these two sourcing locations and we switch it to 50/50 or 70/30 the other way, what does that do? Do we have the ocean capacity? Can our 3PL serve us there? Do we need to use another 3PL?’ 

So they’re developing scenarii. But are they acting on them?

I’m not sure how much acting has been going on recently. A lot of modeling, and waiting and seeing. The advice from trade compliance experts was ‘don’t jump into anything, because it may switch or flip back next week’. 

It’s essentially boiled down to whether, on a long-term basis, something materially was going to change about your cost inputs - or availability of supply, or similar. With this in mind, how do you equip yourself with the ability to do something?

That long-term part is really critical. If you’re doing most of your manufacturing in a place that’s being hit by tariffs or geopolitical unrest, you may want to say ‘we can’t have that exposure on a long-term basis anymore. So, we need to figure out something, if not tomorrow, over the next six to nine months. Because this is not going away anytime soon’.

Most people would like to think they have a two-tiered approach: 

1/. Get through the next quarter

2/. What are we doing over five to 10 years?

Justifying an investment has to be over the long term. It can’t be a transactional thing. 

If something just quickly plugs in, you can turn it off right away. Most people in logistics don’t think of software in that manner. They would rather invest in something, understand its value, how much it costs and what ROI it generates. Then they just keep using it, because they want to rely on it.

What would your killer argument be for adopting visibility now, as opposed to later?

In recent years, part of this was marketing. It was made to seem that visibility was simply a switch you could turn on, and the magic happens. Over time, people have realized you have to put in the effort to get the desired value out. 

So the earlier you get in, the more you understand what effort you need to put in to make [visibility] valuable. The earlier you do it, the longer you have to go through that learning process… and the better you’re positioned you’ll be when the next major sort of crisis happens. A bit like how the more you rehearse a play, the better it is! 

Inversely, if you keep waiting, you’re always going to be at that starting point.

I’d also like to challenge that prevailing wisdom that you only ever get one shot to invest in something; most people are wrong in that scenario. As long as you recognize early on if something is not working [it’s OK]. It’s not as if you’re buying a $7 million licensed product that took two years to implement. There’s more tolerance for things that don’t work out today. It’s what the tech world calls ‘failing fast’. But we don’t like failing in supply chain! That’s why I prefer to call it a ‘learning process’!

Eric Johnson is one of many global supply chain experts speaking at Visibility Now! 2025, November 6 in Paris and online. Join us here...