Control Towers

Control tower solutions remain one of the hottest areas for supply chain applications as more vendors enter this category to provide sense and response capabilities for companies operating complex global supply chains.

Supply chain leaders are still struggling to manage through a tangled mess of legacy systems with outdated architectures, and as long as that is a case, control towers will remain a hot topic within supply chain.

Today, leading control tower software vendors are starting to marry planning and execution applications into one console to provide end-to-end supply chain visibility for course correction.

Infor is buying GT Nexus for $675 million, and with it the company’s cloud-computing expertise and roster of major corporate clients.

The supply chain best-of-breed vendors respond to SCCT needs from their position of business process functionality support strength, whether that is supply chain planning, response management, supply chain execution or fulfillment synchronization. The planning vendor will tend to extend and integrate supply and demand planning with supply chain execution flows, including order fulfillment, transportation, logistics and inventory movement.

Eight essential elements of Supply Chain Control Tower (SCCT) enabling advanced visibility and standardized, real-time analytics from a single source.

Improving organizations' performance and maximizing customer value in a highly competitive marketplace has turned supply chain management and logistics into a highly essential component to global business operations.

This “Control Tower” dashboard should be accessible to any authorized person in the organization to constantly monitor and respond to events as they occur, monitor supplier health and performance, assess the effectiveness of mitigation activities and continuously improve your operations and exposure to risk.

Control towers can be used within many industries for different purposes: airports and train depots use them for traffic control; power plants, especially nuclear plants have elaborate control rooms to monitor operations and third party logistics providers deploy them to track distribution and transportation activities.

The primary goal of the Interplanetary Supply Chain Management and Logistics Architectures (IPSCM&LA) project is to develop a comprehensive SCM framework and planning tool for space logistics.

Cloud-enabled transportation “control towers” are transforming logistics and supply chain performance. Our consulting team explains how shippers can realize benefits from true end-to-end supply chain integration that can be operated through an optimized transportation service network.