How an Intelligent Control Tower Can Provide Autonomous Problem-Solving For Your Supply Chain

What is a Supply Chain Control Tower?

The One Network Control Tower serves as a system of engagement across trading partners and orchestrates companies, people, and assets to work together in real-time to serve the end consumer more efficiently and at a lower cost.

Executives, departmental managers, and supply chain staff in global enterprises are using the One Network Control Tower to monitor, manage, plan, and execute decisions across their companies and with their partners.

This Control Tower can be configured for each role and function, including Transportation Management.

It can aggregate data from your systems and your trading partners’ systems, to give you the big picture of real-time demand, supply, and logistics, while letting you drill down into individual orders and shipments when necessary.

It proactively alerts you to potential problems, their root causes, and contributing factors, and makes recommendations so you can resolve them quickly and efficiently.

You can see the impact of a problem on sales and service levels, as well as the cost associated with each proposed resolution, so you can make better and more profitable decisions.

You will be able to collaborate with colleagues, and with your suppliers and carriers, both domestic and international.

In fact, the Supply Chain Control Tower excels in complex scenarios like international, multi-leg, multi-modal moves.

• It can intelligently represent the legs, based on Advance Shipment Notices provided by suppliers, or based on shipment plans provided by Freight Forwarders.
• If a shipment is delayed, the Control Tower predicts the effects on the following legs, the impact on the customer, and alerts managers.
• It includes Freight Auditing capabilities so that our managers can inspect and verify freight bills for accuracy, and adjust them if necessary.

And when it comes to import-export documentation, the Control Tower automates tiresome manual work, tracks customs hold and clearance events, and keeps things on track by alerting us about upcoming tasks, missing documentation, and milestones.

Visibility and Control Over Inbound Shipments and Outbound Freight

Without real-time visibility to inbound shipments, you don’t know if or when shipments will arrive.

You may often find out that a delivery is late only after it doesn’t arrive. By then it’s too late to do anything, and you’re forced into fire-fighting.

This increases workload and costs.

It undermines your customer service levels and erodes confidence in your brand.

The Control Tower provides real-time visibility to orders and shipments, with real-time tracking across all legs and modes, so you always know exactly what is where and why.

And if something goes wrong, say a container is held up in port, or a truck breaks down, you know immediately, you know its impact on subsequent legs and on the customer, and what the options are to address it.

Artificial intelligence will help assess the risk and costs involved with each problem and the possible resolutions, so you can fix things with minimal disruption and costs.

Intelligent agents can even execute their recommendations autonomously.

Intelligent Control Towers

One Network’s Intelligent Control Tower is not your typical control tower, that provides visibility to immediate trading partners only.

The Intelligent Control Tower monitors, manages, and controls decisions and execution across functions and across companies to optimize the entire network.

The Intelligent Control Tower uses AI and serves as a system of engagement across trading partners, and orchestrates companies, people, and things to work together in real-time to serve the end consumer.

Until recently, supply chain control towers have been all about providing visibility to your immediate trading partners.

But with the development of multi-party, consumer-driven networks, advanced control towers now provide real-time visibility, collaboration, and powerful AI capabilities to move beyond decision-support to decision-making and autonomous control.

Intelligent control towers are helping orchestrate entire value networks to run smarter and faster and delivering bigger benefits for all trading partners. Download Nucleus Research Control Tower Value Matrix 2019 to learn more about how control towers are delivering end-to-end visibility, collaboration, and autonomous capabilities.

Key Capabilities of the Intelligent Control Tower

Control towers offer considerable benefits and capabilities, from end-to-end visibility to advanced automation.

Here are some of the key capabilities to look for in a control tower solution:

• End-to-end Visibility – visibility across supply chain partners, including suppliers, contract manufacturers, transportation carriers, third-party logistics.
• Collaborative information-sharing – share information and collaborate in real-time.
• Early warning alerts and exception management – resolve supply chain disruptions before they disrupt your business.
• Predictive and prescriptive decision-support – using predictive and prescriptive analytics.
• Autonomous decision-making and control – take the robot out of the human and boost productivity.
• Cognitive – the self-correcting supply chain with decision-making and machine learning.

Learn more about supply chain control towers by attending our informative and educational Webcast below.

WEBCAST Master Your Supply Chain with an Intelligent Control Tower

Available On-Demand | Watch Now!

Use control towers and prescriptive analytics to plan, optimize, execute, and automate your supply chain for efficiency and resilience.

Can a control tower solve my supply chain problems? The answer is a resounding “Yes”!  Control towers have evolved way beyond visibility.

Today’s control towers provide powerful capabilities and real-time responsiveness with Autonomous Problem-Solving, Global Demand-Supply Matching, and Global Available-to-Promise.

In this webcast, we explain these capabilities and how to use the power of AI and prescriptive analytics to reduce inventory and logistics costs while improving service levels and resiliency.