Essential Supply Chain Control Tower Capabilities

What is a Supply Chain Control Tower?

Real-time supply chain visibility is made possible by a digital supply chain control tower. It is a centralized hub with the organizational tools, technology, and processes necessary to collect data from every supply chain step. This information guarantees complete transparency and aids a company in making decisions that align with its strategic goals.

Essential Supply Chain Control Tower Capabilities

The following are the three essential capabilities of a supply chain control tower:

• End-to-End Supply Chain Visibility with Control Tower in Real Time

Companies can achieve end-to-end visibility  across their supply chains with a control tower that correlates data across siloed functions. Businesses may thus cope with any deviance by using external event data to provide actionable information on future disruptions, all supplied in personalized dashboards.

• Prescriptive and predictive decision-making

Being reactive is a poor option, given how quickly problems could occur and spread through interconnected supply chains.

With predictive analytics, companies can, thus, better anticipate disruptions, increase resilience, and prioritize actions if they have intelligent notifications and real-time actionable analytics that help them understand the upstream and downstream impact of these crises on consumers.

• Proactive supplier collaboration

Real-time collaboration with suppliers and stakeholders is essential for successfully resolving challenges and fostering innovation. Companies should be able to assemble work teams, specify goals, assign tasks, share information, and communicate outcomes with the aid of a control tower.

Also read: 10 Essentials for an Effective Supply Chain Control Tower

Benefits of Supply Chain Control Tower

Supply chain control towers equip enterprises with centralized visibility, collaborative planning capabilities, and analytical power to build a smarter, nimbler, and more efficient end-to-end supply chain. Benefits include:

• Collaborative Information Sharing

A control tower enables enterprises to break down silos and enable real-time information exchange between supply chain partners. This collaborative approach leads to better supply chain planning.

• Accurate Forecasting and Decision-Making

By consolidating data feeds, control towers provide enterprises end-to-end visibility for predictive analytics and optimization to enable better decision-making.

• Greater Supply Chain Agility

Sharing forecasts and plans via a control tower allows all supply chain stakeholders to respond rapidly to disruptions. Quick coordination enables agile responses.

• Optimum Inventory Levels

Control tower analytics can help enterprises optimize inventory by identifying waste and excess inventory across the network. This allows adjusting stock levels precisely to balance costs and service.

Selecting the Right Supply Chain Control Tower

The pillars of contemporary supply chain control towers are:

• End-to-end visibility
• Precise real-time information
• Actionable insights
• Smooth, automatic orchestration

To accrue supply chain tower benefits, companies must choose the correct next-generation control towers with the capabilities listed below to coordinate swift reactions across the organization to manage a dynamic ecosystem.

• Cloud-built Supply chain control tower

Enterprises can connect diverse data streams and points via a cloud-based control tower, creating the opportunity for dynamic, multi-tier collaboration with suppliers and contract manufacturers, resulting in enhanced visibility beyond the suppliers. Furthermore, they enable the company to be prepared for aggressive scale-ups during the next growth wave while lowering the cost of transmuting disruption.

• Unified supply chain control tower

A resilient data architecture that uses data from inside and outside the company must be the basis for a unified supply chain control tower. It requires IoT integrations to gather market, weather, chain-wide transactional, and enterprise data from obsolete systems like ERP.

• Cutting-edge cognitive technology

Massive volumes of high-dimensional data are analyzed by cognitive technologies like AI and ML, enabling forecasting, optimization, and automation to reach new heights of precision and effectiveness. Modern control towers use cognitive technologies to bring a variety of use cases and increase supply chain management's flexibility and intelligence and reduce reliance on human interaction. These technologies are assisting in resolving some of the most persistent supply chain issues that exist today, from demand sensing to risk assessment and logistics planning to inventory optimization.

Also read : Supply Chain Control Towers Vs. Supply Chain Dashboards – How They Are Different And Why You Should Care

Supply Chain Control Tower Example

An auto OEM in a particular region shut down due to problems from raw material suppliers. The control tower enables the business to answer questions like whether to hunt for a different supplier. If so, where? Should the company adopt regional or global sourcing? How do we evaluate and select the new vendor? And the like.

What to Consider While Deploying a Supply Chain Control Tower

To implement the next-generation, intelligent control towers, companies must consider the following factors:

• Data integrity

An efficient supply chain control tower depends on high-quality data, which directly impacts the output of insights and the degree of visibility it can attain.

• Paradigm shift

Change management is necessary to modify the organizational structures and cultures to develop and sustain these systems to understand better how a new control tower may resolve issues and enhance functioning in global supply chains, enabling their effective roll-out and operation.

• Prepare a checklist

Create a checklist of attributes and capabilities for a contemporary control tower in alignment with the organizational objectives.

• Choosing a partner

Analyze and consider the advantages and disadvantages of control tower providers because picking the right partner is just as crucial as choosing the best technology. Develop a workable plan for deploying, implementing, and evaluating the advantages and beneficial effects of the new control tower in collaboration with the technology provider.

Conclusion

In today's dynamic supply chain environment, advanced control towers are now a prerequisite. In addition to assisting companies in identifying and responding to disturbances in real-time, they also enhance visibility, decision-making, and supply chain operations.

Frequently Asked Questions