Types of Supply Chain Planning Control Tower

1. Types of Supply Chain Planning Control Tower In the era of COVID, many businesses discovered newer ways and methods to transition online. Surprisingly, the management of SCM processes turned out to be more effective than anyone ever imagined. Defining supply chain control tower, it is considered as an agile cloud platform, which is targeted at providing end-to-end supply chain visibility. This tower works on integrating and extending existing systems namely WMS, ERP, and TMS in tandem with other supply chain partners such as suppliers, manufacturers and 3PLs. Control Towers work on offering intelligent, granular visibility and operational control within the entire supply chain. This further works on optimizing lead times, minimizing the inventory costs, and boosting the number of orders delivered on-time. To understand their functioning better, one must be aware of the type of Supply Chain Planning Control Towers available along with their respective functionality. This article will precisely talk about the same: Analytical Control Tower: Analytical control systems work towards consolidating and displaying data, which do not facilitate the users to action on commands that they see. In the process of enhancing the visibility and analytics, a control tower must empower the users to act as and how they want. But, this tower has that kind of limitation attached to its functionality. Operations Control Tower: These two types of operational supply chain control towers offer both visibility and analytics. These also enable users to act on exceptions in real-time. These towers are further bifurcated into two sub types, which are detailed below:

2. Transportation Focused: This category of control towers offer detailed insights into inbound and outbound shipments. Users can have a clear visibility into freight spend, deliveries, ASN, track and trace, on-time delivery, along with other minute details. Since these towers have their dedicated focus on transportation, these are considered as great addition to Transportation Management System (TMS). These also have their focus that offers granular visibility into transportation but miss out on providing detailed visibility and orchestration capabilities which come beyond shipping. Supply Chain Targeted: These control towers work with their focus on multi-enterprise supply chain that also offers greater visibility and control. These put entire focus on enveloping external as well as end-to-end processes and milestones. Along with transportation, these towers also include sales and purchase orders, and manage inventory with both internal and external suppliers, repair, manufacturing, and maintenance. This category of operational towers are therefore great at offering end-to-end supply chain visibility, great in-app control across and comprehensive collaboration with suppliers and partners. After understanding the limitation and advantages of all types of supply chain planning control towers, it is a big question to consider which one to choose. As detailed above, the primary area of significance and difference between each category of tower is their focus. In case you are willing to have end-to-end visibility, and wish to action on your insight, they you must stick your choice with supply chain-focused towers. These are more multi-party driven and serve the entire chain without any exceptions.