Supply Chain Control Tower
Qasim Noor Ellahi
Unit Head Wahousing & Logistics Planning & Excellence at Interloop Limited
In today’s highly volatile and increasingly complex global supply chains, businesses are recognizing the critical need for visibility beyond just transportation.?Visibility is a necessary foundation and first step, but you will also need advanced deep analytics (predicting), providing scenario-based options for the next best action (prescriptive), and decision support to optimize the outcome.
The growing ecosystem of multi-enterprise partners and systems (ERP, WMS, CRM, APS), are putting a strain on organizations’ ability to view and orchestrate their end-to-end operations. Therefore, they need a comprehensive supply chain execution platform that unifies the multi-landscape of parties, systems, and processes, empowering businesses to digitize, optimize and innovate their supply chains across inbound, outbound, and return flows.
6 key technology capabilities for a supply chain control tower:
1.????Continuous intelligence:?Capture data continuously and in real-time (event stream processing or business activity monitoring)
2.????Advanced analytics:?Leverage predictive and prescriptive analytics to move from being reactive to proactive
3.????Impact analysis:?Understand the impact of signals from the digital ecosystem on the company’s supply chain
4.????Scenario modeling:?Simulate different scenarios for providing a suitable smart response
5.????Collaborative response:?Connect and collaborate in the ecosystem (aka collaboration room)
6.????Artificial intelligence:?Drive a higher degree of automation by artificial intelligence/machine learning
?A?real supply chain control tower?is created by combining people, processes, data, organization, and technology to improve visibility, control, and decision-making.
Don’t look at a control tower as a stand-alone supply chain management (SCM) application, but rather as an integrated capability embedded in a broader SCM suite or tool that must offer actionability?from directly within the application – otherwise, they only offer an extensive visual dashboard and no actual control function.