The Big 3 in Supply Chain Optimization: Visibility, Collaboration, Actionable Intelligence

If you're like most transportation or supply chain managers, you want to know what’s where in your supply chain. You need the scale of visibility that will give you the agility and speed to overcome supply chain disruptions. By investing in a supply chain?control tower, you gain the edge you need to provide demand-driven supply chain excellence.

Let's take a look at what a control tower is and how it can help you improve your supply chain.?

A control tower is a centralized software platform that offers permission-based users end-to-end visibility, or across just their portion of the supply chain. In the past, these towers mainly provided visibility to direct trading partners. However, with the development of customer-centric and more complex supply networks, advanced control towers now offer all stakeholders – inside and outside – capabilities that can go far beyond real-time visibility, collaboration, and decision support to AI decision-making and control. Advanced control towers use AI and predictive analytics to detect any activity outside of established rules, such as time, and quickly offer an optimum solution, including preventive measures for the future.

Control tower software also provides a platform for collaboration between all parties involved in the supply chain. This collaboration can help to improve communication and coordination, leading to a more efficient and effective supply chain network.

Key Benefits of a Supply Chain Control Tower?

We’ll cover three of what we consider the most important reasons for using a control tower in this series. First, end-to-end visibility.

One of the most significant benefits of a control tower is that it gives you visibility into every aspect of your supply chain. This is paramount to efficiency, including order entry, routing guide compliance, covering loads, rate confirmation, carrier acceptance, dispatching, and electronic data interchange. A good #TMS will empower you to manage by exception, flagging shipments that will likely miss appointments due to weather, lane disruptions, or substandard carrier performance. Visibility will allow to:

• Know where inventory is located at all times across distribution centers and stores. Implement KPIs and event triggers for exception management
• Integrate #warehousemanagement systems with supplier inventories to expand product delivery
• Reduce the complexity of your #supplychain so that you can manage by exception.
• Perform geographic analysis to determine geographic regions exposed to natural hazards or security risks?

Control towers provide visibility into real-time exception detection, reducing the time between exception and resolution. Reducing the time required to identify and resolve exceptions increases productivity and lowers total operational costs.

Next time, we’ll dive into 2 more #controltower benefits: collaboration and actionable Intelligence.

For a deeper dive on all three, download our free e-book, “Reasons You Need a Supply Chain Control Tower” HERE >> https://bit.ly/3MxtwKk

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