What is a Supply Chain Control Tower?
Supply chain control tower (part of Supply Chain Management) has been defined as a connected, personalised dashboard of data, key business metrics, and supply chain events, it enables businesses to gain a more complete understanding of, prioritise, and resolve critical issues in real time. This increased supply chain visibility and aggregated data to aid in decision-making and supply chain coordination.
What is Control Tower?
Control towers vary in their capabilities, with many providing only limited visibility to nearby partners. A Control Tower is, a supply chain management system that embodies real-time visibility, decision-making, and execution capabilities across the entire supply chain. It enables views and actions on orders and shipments down to the level of individual items, as well as collaboration between all participants. It is powered by real-time data stored in a single shared database and can be implemented and used by any and all supply chain partners. Control Towers built post pandemic provide much more than basic visibility; they also provide predictive and prescriptive analytics for advanced network problem solving and optimization. Additionally, they include extensive capabilities for automating and resolving routine tasks, allowing supply chain control tower managers to focus on the most valuable decisions.
A control tower in supply chain enables enterprises to understand, prioritize and resolve important issues in real time. A more intelligent control tower should enable end-to-end insight across the supply chain – particularly in the event of unanticipated external occurrences. It should make use of sophisticated technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, to assist managers in better forecasting disruptions, increasing resilience, managing exceptions, and responding to unanticipated events.
To know more- An Introduction to Supply Chain Control Tower
Key Capabilities of Supply Chain Control Towers
- Predictive and prescription decision support: Improve managers ability to detect disruptions and strengthen their resilience with intelligent alerts and real-time actionable insights that help them understand the upstream and downstream impact of events on customers and prioritise their response.
- Real-time, end-to-end visibility: Managers can gain end-to-end visibility across supply chain that connects data from disparate systems with external information to deliver meaningful insights into potential disruptions. It uses customizable dashboards to manage various uncertainties that may occur.
- Collaborative information sharing: Improve collaboration and management of exceptions throughout the supply chain with AI-powered control tower integrated with tools that enable them to respond fast to unplanned occurrences and fine-tune execution to drive KPI success.
Other Capabilities
- Continuous intelligence: Continuously and in real time data collection (event stream processing or business activity monitoring).
- Scenario modeling: Simulate various circumstances in order to provide an appropriate intelligent reaction.
- Impact analysis: Recognize the influence of signals from the digital ecosystem on the business supply chain.
- Artificial intelligence: Increase automation with artificial intelligence/machine learning.
- Advanced analytics: Utilize predictive and prescriptive analytics to switch from reactive to proactive decisions.
- Collaborative response: Collaborate and connect within the ecosystem.
AI enabled Control Tower can deliver benefits in Operational as well as Financial domain:
Operational Benefits:
- A comprehensive supply chain and logistics model incorporates all stakeholders and processes, from planning to execution, through the use of AI-powered control tower.
- Reduces significantly the need for manual data management and integration across internal systems and external partners
- Rapidly identifies and resolves performance issues in real time
- Advanced analytics, reporting, and insight rely on a single version of the digital truth (SVODT) to improve supply chain, logistics, and fulfilment performance.
- Early detection of potential problems prevents cascading effects.
- For continuous improvement, keeps a detailed record of transactional and resolution history.
- Comprehensive tracking and tracing of products ensures that promises and commitments are kept. Increases trust among trading partners, as they work with real-time data and a single version of the digital truth.
- Encourages carrier loyalty during periods of driver shortages and rate volatility
- By introducing new services and levels of visibility to your customer base, 3PLs can help you generate additional revenue.
- Instantly establish trading relationships with alternative or new trading partners on the network, including suppliers, carriers, wholesalers, distributors, and customers.
Financial Benefits:
- Cost savings of 30% to 50% on premium freight
- 10%–40% reduction in annual transportation costs
- Increase equipment utilisation between 2% to 10%
- Inventory reductions of 10% to 30% across healthcare, consumer packaged goods, retail, and auto-industrial segments
- 12–50% reduction in overhead associated with manual planning, scheduling, and execution management
- Improved inbound delivery performance and outbound customer service levels by 1% to 8%
Achieve End-To-End Visibility Using Supply Chain Control Tower
Post-pandemic resilience has been bolstered across global supply chains. As businesses begin to emerge and reopen, the supply chain control tower daily challenges are exacerbated by massive disruptions in supply and demand. The imperative to act quickly has never been greater. Businesses require real-time intelligence and actionable recommendations to assist in mitigating disruptions and risk.
This is best accomplished through the use of purpose-built control towers optimised for core functions. A control tower leveraging AI and machine learning, enables end-to-end visibility across systems — from supplier orders to last mile delivery.
It provides accurate, real-time, available-to-promise inventory to help organisations make better decisions and achieve better results. This enables not only the prediction of potential vulnerabilities and disruptions, but also the comprehension of their upstream and downstream consequences, enabling a more rapid response.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is a supply chain control tower?
A supply chain control tower drives real-time visibility by combining people, processes, and analytics-driven data. It has the ability to drive maximum value and reduce the operational risk in an organization.
What is supply chain management?
Supply chain management (SCM) is defined as the handling of the entire production flow within the organization. It provides connected and collaborative processes that generate real-time and accurate data.
What are the three essential capabilities of a supply chain control tower?
The three essential capabilities of a supply chain control tower are end-to-end visibility, analytics, and collaborative actions.
What is a control tower used for?
Control tower is used for predictive and prescriptive decision support which tends to eliminate the shortcomings within the supply chain beforehand.
How do you implement a supply chain control tower?
The control tower is implemented in supply chain by analyzing the company’s processes, inevitable vulnerabilities, and disruptions.