CONTROL TOWER 4.0: TRANSFORMING REACTIVE TO PROACTIVE SUPPLY CHAIN:

“Acclimation to market dynamics will make any organization a dominant player in?the market place."

A control tower can?provide insights into the potential risks and disruptions that may affect the supply chain performance, such as weather events, traffic delays, quality issues, or supplier failures. It can also help to anticipate and mitigate risks and provide alerts and recommendations for recovery actions.

Unfortunately, nearly 70% of companies are still operating in reactive/anticipatory environments centered on balancing supply & demand (Gartner Report, 2022). A reactive supply chain often fails to address uncertainty, complexity and market risks. Key challenges with reactive supply chains are as follows:

• Lack of inventory visibility across the value chain
• Inadequacy of horizontal integration
• Inability to align supply and demand
• Limited agility - unable to quickly react to demand shifts
• Lack of visibility to capacity and proper allocation
• Inefficient analytical capabilities - data capture to assess & act based on real time performance

As supply chains become longer, dynamic, and increasingly complex, organizations struggle to cope with market uncertainties and are compelled to build?proactive & agile supply chains.?These proactive models help organizations attain supply chain maturity through deeper collaboration and orchestration.

Collaboration involves horizontal integration of suppliers and customers. Orchestration involves connection within the organization to act ahead of time. An essential step in this process, as part of the transformation to a proactive supply chain, is to evaluate the maturity of the existing supply chain.

#. Types of supply chain control towers:

1.????Logistics/transportation control towers

Logistics/transportation control towers offer advance shipping notifications, delivery data and track-and-trace information and visibility into inbound and outbound logistics.

2.????Fulfillment control towers

Fulfillment control towers specialize in assisting package shipments, and are designed to help expedite orders while reducing the overall cost-to-serve.

3.????Inventory control towers

Inventory control towers enable real-time insights into inventory management, with special emphasis on preventing inventory stock-outs and shortages, excess

4.????Supply assurance control towers

Supply assurance control towers ensure there’s an adequate supply available, that more supply is planned for delivery, and other matters related to supply.

5.????E2E supply chain control towers

E2E supply chain control towers are engineered to provide visibility across internal and external systems and processes, with applications for various departments or entities.

#. Considerations when deploying a supply chain control tower:

• Data quality

An effective supply chain control tower depends on quality data, which directly influences the level of visibility that can be achieved, as well as the output of insights.

• Practical and actionable outputs

For data to be useful, it must first be usable. Practical and actionable outputs ensure data is understandable and applicable to common activities and problems.

• Mindset change management

Deploying a control tower typically requires much planning and significant changes in operation, and a concerted effort to get away from existing mindsets through training, mentoring and coaching.

#. How can a purpose-built control tower help you achieve end-to-end visibility?

• World events have driven?home the need to strengthen resilience across global supply chains. As businesses start to emerge and reopen, the day-to-day challenges faced by supply chain and fulfillment leaders are being amplified by enormous disruptions in supply and demand.
• The need to act quickly has never been more crucial. To respond effectively, companies need real-time intelligence and actionable recommendations to help mitigate disruptions and risk.
• That’s best achieved with purpose-built control towers designed to optimize core supply chain functions. For example, a purpose-built control tower could give you essential real-time insights to manage inventory more effectively.

#. Understanding Supply Chain Maturity

In proactive supply chains “organizations have the ability to derive better results through their processes across the product life cycle" (Kalinowski, 2014).?Typically, organizations tend to meet their strategic goals by establishing a clear agile "one-business" approach. To accomplish this, an elemental framework is shown as following:

• Define Supply Chain Vision: Proactive & agile supply chain
• Access Supply Chain Maturity: Understand maturity across plan / source / make / delivery / serve
• Build Roadmap to Vision: Deployment strategy based on maturity to meet vision

#. The 4 stages of supply chain maturity that convert a supply chain from reactive to proactive, with corresponding market response time (MRT), and are shown below:

#. Attaining Supply Chain Maturity with Control Tower 4.0:

Control Tower 4.0 (CT 4.0) is an intelligent digital control tower, which monitors, manages, enables decisions and execution across value chain to optimize the entire end-to-end (E2E) network. CT 4.0 is equipped?with collaborative information sharing, self-correcting supply chains, and machine learning.

?Potential Keys to the Intelligent Control Tower:

• Enhanced visibility to avoid disruption from unexpected events
• Standards for functional excellence: Cross functional decision making - cognitive analytics
• Spans vertical silos to horizontal processes
• Value creation across all steps in supply chain

Supply chains with CT 4.0 offer a single version of truth across functional boundaries, suppliers, manufacturers, transportation carriers, and third-party logistics providers.

This is attained through improved communication and collaboration; achieving the often coveted agile, resilient, and responsive supply chain.

#. CT 4.0 model is shown below: