Over the past few years Supply Chain has been rapidly evolving and this evolution is more real-time, provides visibility to partners, enriched data and with the help of Machine Learning data is more predictive. With enriched data and Machine learning we see a persistent growth in the Supply Chain Towers.
What is Supply Chain Tower?
A Supply Chain Tower is a platform that provides visibility to immediate Trading Partners only. With the help of AI control towers act as a bridge across trading partners.
The KPI’s of a Supply Chain Tower are
Collaboration: A platform to enable collaborations
across all multi- parties, both internal as well as external
trading partners.
Optimization: In today’s world with the increase in the
complexity of supply chain we need to build effective
algorithms which help to automate the decision-making process.
Many companies with large inward and outward flow of shipments
use this platform as in umbrella to manage critical information
like which shipments are still pending, late deliveries, etc.
This is where visibility is most needed. Most control towers
are either analytical or Operational.
Analytical Control towers are more focussed on the data
fortification and display while the Operational is more
focussed on the execution of the functions in the supply chain.
With most technology vendors now having to choose between
Analytical Control tower vs Operation control tower, leads
internally to either transport focused, or Supply chain focused.
⁕ Transportation focused: These control towers
focus mostly on the outbound and inbound transportation across
shipments, ASN, deliveries, track and trace, freight spend,
on-time delivery, etc. Typically purchased as an offering
included within a TMS technology, they are often siloed from
other supply chain processes providing granular visibility into
transportation but lacking end-to-end visibility into pre- or
post- transportation steps, or proving orchestration beyond
transport carriers
⁕ Supply Chain focused: Supply chain focused
control towers focus on the multi-enterprise supply chain
ensuring visibility and control across internal as well as
external supply chain processes and milestones. This may include
transportation, sales and purchase orders, inventory across
internal and external suppliers, manufacturing, maintenance &
repair, order consolidation and splitting, etc. These control
towers are focused on end-to-end supply chain visibility and
control across your entire supply chain network that includes
real-time collaboration with suppliers and partners.
The biggest question arises as to “What kind of visibility is needed?” If we are more focussed on the technology aspect, then we lack behind the analytical part. Supply chains are becoming more multi- enterprise, multi- tenant, multi-partied which challenges technology vendors to focus more on the supply chain.
A platform providing end-to-end visibility, collaboration, and optimization view has a supply chain tower that enables supply chain orchestration.
DXchange Integration Cloud provides a combination of both Analytical and Operational control towers which supports multi- enterprise, multi- tenant architecture.
DXchange Integration Cloud provides collaboratively optimized end-to-end visibility by providing a platform that integrates planning and execution to help customer receive ultimate experience.