As corporations expand, globalize and mature, the importance of having a real-time view of goods being manufactured, sourced, stored and moved through a complex maze of supply chain operations is ever-increasing. The fragile nature of supply chains was exposed during the global pandemic, and organizations have tried to make their supply chains more robust and resilient.
Corporations have already invested in enterprise planning tools, and the next wave of investment has led to the adoption of myriad technologies, including blockchain, cloud, IOT, Metaverse, AI and GenAI. The introduction of these technologies has made the technology landscape more diverse, and, in order to reap the maximum benefit, put the importance of a “Supply Chain Control Tower” into focus.
This paper examines the challenges corporations are trying to address, the difficulties they face in adoption, the building blocks of an effective control tower and the business benefits that corporations reap through real-time supply chain visibility.
Benefits of a real-time, connected and resilient modern supply chain
The leaders and laggards in industry are separated by the adoption of modern technologies to strengthen their supply chains. On several metrics ranging from productivity, agility, speed to market and adherence to sustainability norms, companies that invested in their supply chains outperform their competition by factors ranging from 1.5x to 10x. In a stalled or shrinking market, a 10% cost reduction in supply chain efficiency can easily produce more return with less effort than a 10% increase in sales.
Control Tower solves digital supply chain challenges
The primary challenge faced by corporations in strengthening their supply chains and implementing a Control tower is a hybrid underlying applications landscape comprising multiple ERPs, Manufacturing Execution Systems, under-invested Plant Control systems, Point Solutions, Homegrown applications and variations of adoption of existing stack across plants, warehouses and supplier facilities.
Other challenges include variations in processes prevalent in engineering, procurement, manufacturing and logistics functions. This leads to data being captured and stored in silos, isolated processes, redundancies and mistakes and omissions made due to these factors. Supplier management without access to operations visibility further compounds the problem that corporations try to overcome with manual intervention. All these factors lead to decisions being made in isolation for critical functions, often leading to inefficiencies that directly impact the bottom line, speed to market, lower inventory turnarounds, inappropriate stocking levels and unfulfilled delivery schedules.
Control Tower functional architecture
Control Tower does not seek to displace existing execution systems. It attempts to integrate data sources already prevalent in the existing applications, remove redundancies and logically relate them to highlight exceptions and aid decision-making for procurement, manufacturing, logistics, supply chain and operations functions. It achieves these objectives by creating robust links to external systems (both inside and outside the corporation) and existing applications and creating a unified presentation layer for the end user. Furthermore, based on decisions made by the user as well as transactions executed, it populates underlying applications with clean and validated data that further improves visibility across the enterprise.
The future of Control Tower
A smart (self-executing) contract, blockchain's critical building block, is a set of intelligent logic based on rules that govern business transactions. The logic set is embodied in the software and distributed across a blockchain network whose nodes represent supply chain participants. When executed, the logic determines if and how a transaction is posted to the blockchain. For example, smart contract logic might check to see if an invoice from a registered agent has been reconciled via a purchase order and send payment to a supplier when a shipment is received, as signaled via a blockchain fabric.
Summary
Supply chains are getting more complex by the day and are an important determinant of the bottom line of corporations. Leaders are adopting a wide variety of technologies to integrate systems to provide end-to-end coverage and real-time decision support. Control Tower helps with the integration journey and helps harmonize the data from internal and external stakeholders to provide reliable and real time data based on which end users can make the right decisions. Emerging technologies like Blockchain further extend the coverage of Control Tower, and GenAI provides advanced and intuitive analytical capabilities to support end-user decision-making. In essence, Control Tower is a tool that provides competitive differentiation to corporations and enables a smarter enterprise.
