Harness your Supply Chain Control Tower

What is a Supply Chain Control Tower?

There is a lot of confusion in the market about what a control tower actually means and offers to supply chain organizations.

Gartner defines a supply chain control tower as a concept that results in combining people, process, data, organization and technology. Control towers capture and use (close to) real-time operational data from across the business ecosystem to provide enhanced visibility and improve decision making.?

Such a platform:?

- Provides knowledge to supply chain teams of what is happening in their supply chain, why it is happening and how to address it quickly?

- Depending on the control tower use case chosen, it could help to reduce lost sales, logistics costs or inventory discounting.?

- In the big picture, they help companies to deliver quality products, services, and customer experiences at competitive prices. In an era where there is lessening customer loyalty, this is essential to win customers with better customer service levels.

How do Supply Chain Control Towers work?

Supply chain Control Towers rely on the data that is provided to them to add value to the analysts that use them.

What kind of data is used to develop of a control tower??

Depending on the kind of control tower use case, different kinds of data are integrated.

These can include data from:?

- Systems like ERP, DMS, WMS and TMS?

- Sensors like bar codes, RFID, IoT devices?

- GPS, Weather, Road Traffic, Port Traffic etc?

- Unstructured data from social media and other sources

Control Towers combine this data with logic (multiple techniques including AI, Machine Learning, Heuristics and simple analytics can be used) to provide insights to supply chain analysts.?

?Who should use a Supply Chain Control Tower??

- In the current volatile and disruptive environment (thanks to both natural and man-made calamities), it is essential to make the supply chains agile and resilient.?

- This calls for a lot of visibility and intelligence to be built into the supply chains. Visibility is many companies limited as most of the operational supply chain data is across multiple siloed systems.?

- Using a traditional approach, all this data can be put into a Data warehouse and reports can be generated. However this is a cost and effort intensive exercise and most times the data would only be available as an after-the-fact. On top of this, the reports might not be actionable.?

- In?cases where resilience and agility of supply chains becomes very important for maintaining the required service levels, those organizations become early adopters of Supply Chain Control Towers.?

What are the business drivers to adopt Control Towers??

There are several different types of control towers. Each of them provide different value to the users.?

- Logistics Control Tower: These control towers offer advance shipping notifications, delivery data and visibility into inbound and outbound logistics.?

- Inventory Control Tower: These control towers provide real-time insights into inventory, their blend / composition, their ETA at the destination with special emphasis on preventing inventory stock-outs and safety stock violations.?

- Supplier Control Tower: In case there are several tiers of suppliers to an OEM, these control towers provide visibility and supply assurance using inputs from each of the key suppliers across the tiers. For eg – for an OEM, a forging supplier might be Tier-1, an ingot manufacturer might be Tier-2 and a steel manufacturer could be Tier-3.??

?In general however, the organizations target to achieve better capabilities in:??

- Demand Sensing and forecasting??

- AI enabled smart alerts??

- ML based insights??

- Impact analysis and scenario modelling??

- Digital playbooks for events that occur frequently??

- Collaboration between various stakeholders?using visibility & workflows??

?How to deploy a Control Tower?

Before starting a control tower project, the following points need to be considered:??

- Data Quality: Garbage In, Garbage Out. But at the same time perfect data also does not exist. Understanding the quality of data and improving it over time is important.??

- Scalable Architecture: Most control towers start with a small focus but increase their functionality over time. To make this possible, flexible and scalable architecture is important.??

- Change Management: Significant changes in the way operations are run are needed to make a control tower successful. This calls for new perspectives around supply chain functions.??

With the above considered, the risk of project failure is considerably reduced.??

Usually the first few releases?of control towers are done with a very specific use-cases in mind, that could translate into quick business value.??

After the initial release, each additional sprint could add scale (additional entities, regions, or functional areas) while adding depth (better algorithms, visibility, smart alerts and workflows)?