Supply Chain Control Tower considerations

Supply Chain Control Towers play an essential role in helping companies transition successfully from siloed legacy systems to a collaborative, resilient, real-time digital enterprise network.?

Supply chains (SCs) have traditionally struggled to work together across several independent management divisions or business units (warehousing, transportation, distribution) to fulfil customer orders. Organisations require an SC platform to enable systems unification, network-wide collaboration, and process convergence, such as the Multiparty Orchestration Platform (MOP) approach increasingly demanding a disruptive and evolving climate.

SC Control Towers is traditionally defined as a customised, connected data dashboard, key business metrics, and events across SC, from visibility and alerts to prescriptive decision support and full AI-based automation. Control Towers can more broadly optimise?accuracy and efficiency than any other technology, enabling organisations to understand better, prioritise and solve critical problems in real-time.

Unfortunately, many control towers fail on the fundamental and critical elements essential to gain complete visibility and control of today’s SC. They show what is going wrong but fail to fix it or provide the tools to solve problems quickly and efficiently.?

The problem is that many of those fundamental elements are based on invalid assumptions about how business is done but are no longer valid.

Instead of relying on a separate visibility solution for each, the Control Tower connects each specialised division and fragmented systems into a single platform. This totalising visibility of the network allows companies:

·???????To avoid stock loss.?

·???????Improves on?Time in Full?(OTIF) deliveries.

·???????Provides greater transparency to customers.?

·???????When running across multiple customers, suppliers, distributors, and logistics service providers worldwide, it is vital to quickly detect and resolve delays and disruptions, such as ocean container rolls, changes in air capacity, natural disasters, and demand volatility.?

·???????It offers holistic, granular visibility of all processes (sea, air, rail, land, and last mile, including parcel), as well as in-app management, so you can quickly and proactively identify and resolve issues to meet critical business objectives.

·???????Today’s control towers provide potent capabilities and real-time responsiveness with autonomous problem solving, global supply-demand matching, and global availability to carry out those activities.

A highly efficient Control Tower must solve SC problems as they?have?evolved far beyond visibility.?SC executives are under heavy pressure to provide customers with what they need, when and where they need it, and optimise supply operations and achieve cost-saving goals.?It is incredibly complex in times marked by unpredictable but inevitable vulnerabilities and disruptions.

A smarter Control Tower should provide end-to-end visibility across the SC, especially on unforeseen external events.?You need to leverage advanced technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence with Machine Learning to help break down data silos, reduce or eliminate manual processes, and gain real-time actionable insights to help mitigate disruptions and risk.

Leaders can establish end-to-end visibility across the SC with a Control Tower; it is capable of correlating data dispersed across siloed systems with external event information and PROVIDING actionable insights into potential outages, all in dashboards.

You can manage: exceptions, better ANTICIPATE outages whilst improving resilience with intelligent alerts in time to help understand the impact of events on customers upstream and downstream and prioritise their response.

Further comments:?you can most easily optimise core SC with designed purpose-built Control Towers.??A smarter Control Tower will enable collaboration between teams and partners and preserve company insights to improve and accelerate decision-making and outcomes.??The need to act quickly is more important than ever.

Are you optimising your Supply Chain operations through a Control Tower?

Dave Food

M: +44 7775 861863

Source: SupplyChain Magazine