Nucleus Research: Control Tower Value Matrix 2016

In this follow-up to last year’s inaugural report on this software category, Nucleus evaluated the usability and functionality of the control tower solutions offered by commercial vendors.

Leading vendors are E2open, One Network, Kinaxis, Elementum, Pearl Chain, JDA Software, and LLamasoft.

Market Overview
Interest in control tower solution is growing as companies operating complex, global supply chains seek visibility over their own operations and those of their partners (Nucleus Research, Q39 - The Future of Demand Driven is Control Tower, March 2016).

To control costs and position product for sale, more companies realize that they need to be able to make changes in production and distribution in response to changing market events or consumer behavior. Control towers give them both a platform and a console to see events happening and make modifications.

Control towers have their roots in visibility applications that provided overviews of shipments or production.

Today’s leading control tower solutions are more encompassing, taking a view broader than just that of a single enterprise.

They provide transparency over supply chain partners, be they suppliers, contract manufacturers, transportation carriers, or third-party logistic providers.

They also have a front end to capture demand, such that demand signals can drive production and distribution.

Leading towers can process streaming data from multiple parties to create an end-to-end picture.

In addition, they provide advanced business intelligence such as prescriptive and predictive analytics to guide supply chain managers in making data-informed decisions.

Going forward, Nucleus expects that more companies will employ supply chain control towers as they seek to use their supply chains as a way to obtain and preserve their advantage in volatile markets.