Absence of industry collaboration is the biggest barrier in terms of complete visibility. The desired level of visibility has also been tricky to achieve due to the challenging volumes and complicated nature.
What is a Supply Chain Control Tower?
A supply chain control tower isn’t a physical structure, nor is it a conventional freight handling desk of decades past. Instead, it serves as a centralized hub that integrates various technologies, organizational tools, and processes essential for capturing, analyzing, and reporting data across all stages of the supply chain, from the manufacturer to the consumer.
A supply chain control tower is a simple source of real-time information for all decisions.
Modern control towers use cloud-based platforms, artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, API integrations, IoT-enabled devices, and transportation management systems to collect and analyze data across the supply chain. These technologies help businesses identify trends, monitor performance, and respond more effectively to changing transportation conditions.
In 2019, the market valued the global control towers at USD 5.28 billion, and it anticipates a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.7% from 2020 to 2027.
Traditionally, businesses managed freight and distribution from either the point of origin or destination. Control towers break free from location constraints and operate seamlessly across the entire supply chain network.
What are the benefits of the Control Towers?
A supply chain control tower is a centralized platform that brings together transportation data, shipment activity, and operational insights from across the supply chain. Rather than operating as a physical location, a control tower provides a single source of visibility that helps businesses monitor performance, manage exceptions, and coordinate transportation activities.
By combining transportation management technology, real-time shipment information, and analytics, control towers help organizations improve decision-making while increasing visibility across suppliers, carriers, distribution centers, and customers.
- Predicts unforeseen external factors and helps mitigate the risks involved.
- Becomes an autonomous decision-making (predictive and descriptive) process
- Limits the dependence on human intervention, making the data handling fool-proof.
- Helps enhance productivity and reduce costs.
- Provides early warning alerts and assists with exception management.
- Implements an improved and shared communication, thereby providing end-to-end visibility.
How do these Control Towers help with Visibility?
The importance of supply chain visibility has been debated in detail over the last two decades. With the Internet of Things (IoT) and big data, companies have drastically improved visibility within their supply chain processes. However, the Reuters EFT 2020 Supply Chain Report shows that only 60% of manufacturers and retailers currently have end-to-end supply chain visibility. There is certainly more scope for improvement in this niche model.
A control tower is a unified hub. It analyses data, including that of freight forwarding, tracking, tracing, exception alerts, and delivery scheduling for seamless collaboration. Information sharing that happens in real-time through supply chain control towers resolves supply chain disturbances before they disrupt the business. The resultant visibility can be seen across the supply chain partners, including suppliers, contract manufacturers, transportation carriers, and third-party logistics.
Supply chain control towers offer the needed visibility to detect exceptions in real-time.
The supply chain control tower allows for better communication and partnership at crucial junctures amongst key participants in the network. Supply chain control towers offer the needed visibility to detect exceptions in real-time. This approach reduces the time it takes to detect and resolve exceptions.
Building a More Connected Supply Chain
Supply chain control towers help organizations move beyond basic shipment tracking by providing the visibility and insights needed to improve transportation performance. As supply chains continue to grow more complex, centralized data, real-time visibility, and proactive decision-making have become essential for managing risk and meeting customer expectations.
With the right technology and logistics strategy, businesses can create a more connected, efficient, and resilient supply chain.
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