What You Need to Know About Supply Chain Control Tower

There have been massive shifts in consumer behavior due to the effects of the Covid 19 pandemic. The predictable consumer that existed in categories like shopper frequency and brand preference before Covid has disappeared. These business shifts have led to the need to practice revenue growth management. Also, businesses need to restructure their category growth strategies. Revenue growth management involves driving profitable, sustainable growth from your consumer base through various strategies around promotions, assortment, pricing, and trade management.

What is Supply Chain Control Tower

This control tower involves a connection of main business and organization metrics, events, and an individualized dashboard of data across the supply chain. This tower allows businesses to prioritize, resolve and understand important issues in real-time. Supply chain officers face pressure to facilitate customers with things they need at the right place and time while minimizing costs. This pressure is usually challenging when unpredictability and unavoidable disruptions and vulnerabilities are unavoidable.

A perfect supply chain control tower must facilitate visibility fully in any supply chain, especially in unpredictable external occurrences. It must grasp advanced technologies like artificial intelligence with machine learning to help organizations real-time actionable insights, subdivide data silos and eliminate or reduce manual processes.

Additionally, a significant supply chain control tower enables collaboration across trading associates and teams. Also, it helps preserve business knowledge to accelerate and improve decision-making and results. Consequently, this control tower helps in better predictions of disruptions, management of exceptions, response to unplanned events, and improves resiliency.

Forms of Supply Chain Control Towers

Fulfillment Control Towers

These control towers focus on helping with package shipments. Fulfillment control towers are planned to assist with expediting orders while decreasing the general cost-to-serve.

Supply Assurance Control Towers

This supply tower assists in ensuring the availability of adequate supply, and more supply plans for delivery are made.

Transportation or Logistics Control Towers

This control tower facilitates tracking and tracing information, advanced shipping notifications, and delivery data. Also, it offers visibility into outbound and inbound logistics.

E2E Supply Chain Control Towers

This control tower facilitates visibility across external and internal processes and systems, having applications for different entities or departments.

Inventory Control Towers

These control towers enhance current intuitions into catalogue management. This control tower enhances this through a particular emphasis on avoiding shortages and stock-outs.

Factors to Consider When Establishing a Supply Chain Control Tower

Actionable and Practical Outputs

Data must be usable first for it to be helpful. Actionable and practical outputs allow data applicability and understanding in prevalent problems and activities.

Mindset Change Management

Installing a control tower needs significant changes in operation and a lot of planning. Also, it requires a joint effort to break out from existing limited mindsets.

Data Quality

A productive control tower in supply chain relies on quality information. Quality information directly impacts the output of insights and the degree of visibility attained.

Implementation Phases of a Supply Chain Control Tower