From compliance to competitive advantage: the new value of operational transparency

I wouldn't have written this six years ago, because the professional environment I was working in hadn't quite arrived there yet; operational transparency sat in governance frameworks and disclosure documents, it was the kind of thing that mattered enormously to the people whose job it was to manage it, and almost not at all to anyone sitting in a commercial or marketing function. That separation felt natural at the time, but no more, seeing how the past few years of data make it difficult to argue that it ever really should have.

Supply chain disruptions now cost organisations an estimated USD 184 billion annually, according to Swiss Re, cited in the 2025 J.S. Held Global Risk Report; and a Maersk survey of 2,000 European shipping customers from the same report found that 76% experienced disruptions that delayed their business operations in the past year, with 22% reporting 20+ disruptive incidents in that period. A study from DP World put the annual cost to the consumer goods sector alone at over USD 12 billion, with the average logistics failure costing a company around USD 680,000. What the DP World report said was that consumers have now lived through enough disruption to recognise what failed logistics looks like and that reliability has become a direct signal of trust; that sentence stayed with me because it isn't really about logistics, right?

That turns out to be harder than most organisations expect. A Gartner survey found that only 29% of supply chain organisations have built the capabilities necessary to deliver on future performance requirements, and research from 2026 suggests that only 6% of businesses have achieved full supply chain visibility across all tiers of their operations. So the gap runs all the way back through the organisation itself, into procurement and operations and compliance, long before it becomes a communications problem.

I spent several years in the maritime industry, coming to the industry later in my career than most people in it; and one of the things that became clear fairly quickly was how much the maturity of an organisation's compliance and procurement function determined what was actually possible in marketing. In the organisations where compliance had real depth, where procurement had genuine visibility into the supply chain and the internal relationships to surface what was actually going on, the marketing function had something to work with; we could build positioning that was grounded in operational fact rather than aspiration, hold up claims about reliability under direct questioning from clients and partners who knew the industry well enough to push on them, and communicate through disruption with enough specificity that stakeholders didn't feel they were being managed. The organisations without that internal maturity were producing broadly similar external messaging; it just couldn't survive contact with a well-informed audience, and in an industry as compact and well-connected as ports and terminals, well-informed audiences are pretty much the only kind you encounter.

That experience isn't unique to maritime, the Edelman Trust Barometer, drawing on over 32,000 respondents across 28 countries, found that six in ten people now report a moderate to high sense of grievance against institutions, with views of business ethics falling sharply among the more aggrieved segments; the report noted that perception of conduct is increasingly tied to observable behaviour rather than stated values. 60% of consumers now cite trust and transparency as the most important brand traits according to CMSWire, and Salsify's Consumer Research found that 87% of shoppers will pay more for brands they trust; these are findings about whether the internal reality of how an organisation operates matches what it's willing to say out loud about itself.

BCI's analysis found that extreme weather became the single largest cause of supply chain disruption for the first time in nearly a decade, surpassing cyber threats; PwC found that 77% of executives reported their company was negatively affected by compliance complexity in the same year. The operating environment isn't simplifying, and organisations that keep treating transparency as a downstream communications task are going to keep being caught out by disruptions that require them to explain, in real time, things they haven't fully understood themselves.

The organisations that are starting to address this that have figured out that transparency is most useful when it's built into how decisions get made rather than assembled afterwards in response to pressure, that compliance and procurement maturity isn't just a risk management asset but a commercial one, and that the marketing and communications function can only be as credible externally as the operational visibility it has access to internally.

That's the version of this argument I wouldn't have been able to make years ago, and I'm reasonably confident it's the right one now.