An introduction video on Real Time Smart Supply Chain Control Tower

I have been working with designing and developing a new generation of supply chain solution for last three months.The original concept of developing a Sales Force based simple forecasting system is still in the engineering phase. Other than that, many ideas went to the white board and scrapped. Those ideas scrapped because I couldn’t convince my audience about how this solution is different from existing solutions. After many weeks of brain storming and exchange of ideas, I think I found another niche. This concept is 'Supply Chain Control Tower.. built-on advanced Big data technology stack.

As everyone knows, modern supply chains are complex entities spanning multiple geographies, customers, suppliers and partners and running them efficiently requires synchronization across multiple systems and data sources.

Today’s advanced supply chain planning system completely depends on data from four walls of ERP. DO you think it’s enough to react to real time problems?

In many advanced planning systems, the data collection is a nightly process. It means if something is wrong in your supply chain, it will take minimum 24 hours to know that there is a trouble and many more hours/days of analysis after that to fight that risk. The real question is should the organizations wait that long??

Let’s talk about a practical example. With the innovation of modern big data technologies, we can continuously monitor thousands of data sources and sense a risk immediately. If there is a fire or disruption in one of contract manufacturer’s factory, it can be detected instantaneously by analyzing social media feeds. We don’t have to wait for someone else to notify us about this problem (By following all hierarchical communication method, it may be more than 48 hours). By integrating this data with existing supply chain systems, we can develop an advanced strategy to minimize our risk exposure.

The key is identifying the risk outside of traditional information gathering mechanism and take real time actions without waiting for information or wasting time.

The above example can be extended to various other practical scenarios like missing container, truck breakdown, flight cancellation(For air freight), real time supplier and customer credibility validation and thousands of other scenarios supply chain is facing every minute.

Recently, supply chain control towers have emerged as solutions to the problem of providing end-to-end real time visibility. It can be defined as an advanced supply chain execution-planning tool

Real Time Supply Chain Control Tower = Big Data Technology + ERP Data + Data from Outside Sources + Real Time Analysis + Trained Professionals + Best In Class What-If Analysis for alternate options when the risk is detected

I hope if everything goes as planned, I will have a prototype ready by the end of December-2017.

The below video was prepared to throw some light on the concept of supply chain control tower. It doesn’t say anything about what goes under the hood ( That’s still work in Progress), but it explains the concept with some simple easy to understand illustration.