Supply chains have gotten more distributed for good reasons: more suppliers reduces single-source risk, more regional fulfillment improves delivery times, and more flexible sourcing absorbs price volatility better than a concentrated network can. Each of those decisions is individually sound. The cumulative effect is a network with more points of failure and less centralized visibility than the simpler network it replaced, and that tradeoff doesn't always get evaluated as deliberately as the individual sourcing decisions did.
Visibility in a distributed network is a different problem than visibility in a concentrated one. It's not enough to track the status of a shipment. The organizations that manage this well track the health of the relationships and capacity behind each node, because the failure that actually disrupts a distributed network is rarely a single shipment going missing. It's a supplier's capacity quietly degrading over months until a demand spike reveals it has no slack left to absorb.
Building that kind of visibility requires data-sharing arrangements that go beyond the transactional relationship most organizations have with their suppliers, and that's as much a contracting and relationship question as it is a technology question. The technology to aggregate and monitor distributed supply data is largely mature. The harder problem is getting the network's participants to share the leading indicators, capacity utilization, lead time trends, financial health, that actually predict disruption before it happens, rather than only the lagging indicators that confirm disruption after it already has.
Organizations that solve this treat their key suppliers less like vendors being managed and more like partners whose operational health is directly relevant to their own, with the data-sharing and joint planning that follows from that framing. It's a different kind of relationship than most procurement functions are built to manage, and increasingly it's the relationship that determines whether a disruption is a minor adjustment or a real crisis.