Supply Chain Control Tower

In today’s competitive business environment, institutions that deal with the changing and developing customer demands in the usual supply chain structure develop a new perspective and create new processes to participate in this race. In the supply chain structure; The increase in global production activities, the increase in production facilities, etc., have made the process both complex and unmanageable or uncontrollable. Various solutions and methods have been created for these complicated processes or activities, evolving from the past to the present.

What function does the supply chain tower have at this point?

The Supply chain control tower is a connected, personalized dashboard containing data, key business metrics, and events across the supply chain. The supply chain control tower allows companies to simultaneously understand, prioritize and resolve critical issues. At this point, supply chain managers are under tremendous pressure to optimize their supply operations and achieve cost-effective targets while providing customers’ needs anytime, anywhere.

So what features should an intelligent supply control tower have?

1. It should provide end–to–end visibility.
2. It should leverage advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence to help you reduce or eliminate processes.
3. It should protect corporate information to enable collaboration between teams and solution partners and improve and accelerate decision-making ability and gains.

As a result, it helps you spot problems, increases costs, manage any condition and be prepared for unplanned events.

The business processes of each company and the solution need to optimize these processes differ. For this reason, it is tough for ready-made solutions in the market to provide an adequate response to all requests of a company. At this point, the supply chain tower comes into play and offers these solutions to you quickly and practically.

These opportunities can be listed as follows;

1. Can predict trends,
2. To be able to measure market changes by comparing them with previous reference periods,
3. Ensuring that observations and decisions about performance are made available to all stakeholders, etc. 

It is possible to see the possibilities provided by the control tower in this diagram with its stages.

In this way, companies save time and save costs at the same time, calculate the income and expense according to the needs of the customers, calculate the delivery times and arrival times of the products, gain the best competence in the field of communication, improve the ability to respond to problems instantly, reduce the risk rate. Most importantly, artificial intelligence, which contributes to digital transformation, accelerates machine learning and instantly adapts to technological developments.

How to Build a Supply Chain Control Tower

1. A control tower should be established and defined as an independent operational unit,
2. Logistics experts meet and work in teams with your key personnel,

The team may consist of:

1. Personnel with transportation sector infrastructure,
2. Personnel with supply chain and goods flow infrastructure,
3. Personnel with IT background who can exchange data between parties

At this point, the different primary objectives of supply chain management should not be ignored. Regulation of logistics processes, continuous improvement, and keeping the demand and supply in balance can be counted among these primary objectives.

In this respect, in today’s world, where global competition has reached its peak, making profit has become a process that occurs while purchasing and producing, not by purchasing. For this reason, companies need to ensure the coordination and control of all operational procedures to ensure continuity. Moreover, providing efficiency in the whole chain should make it a target to reach goals such as profitability and customer satisfaction easily.

Considering these criteria, companies need to dominate supply chain management. At this point, they should plan the stages one by one and show a correct course with a plan accordingly. Furthermore, they must give the same attention to every point in the settings created within the scope of the supply control tower because a mishap can cause a chain error. In this case, it will both cause an imbalance in the income-expenditure balance and may cause an error in the bridge established between the product and the customer.