Control towers were a foundational step change when they first emerged. Like their namesake, they offered the promise of 360° views, monitoring potential risks and chokepoints in flows. But the pace and complexity of supply chains continue to evolve—and organizations now need the next generation of control towers to master today’s variability, volatility and interconnectivity.
It’s important to identify a disruptive event as quickly as possible. But visibility is just the first step. How do you respond? What parts of your operation are impacted? How do you quickly identify dependencies outside your domain—whether across functions or beyond your four walls? How do you weigh options and pull the best available levers in coordination with your trading partners? Does the predicted impact even warrant intervention, and how will change ripple through other activities? And how do you create a self-learning, self-healing environment in which change informs both future plans so they’re more feasibly constrained, and execution to reduce firefighting?
Reactive by design, traditional control towers fail to address the interconnected, network-wide nature of modern supply chain operations.
The good news is that next-generation control tower capabilities are available to raise the ante on visibility, embedding collaboration with context for each decision-maker, and seamlessly driving action. But how do today’s command centers differ from traditional control towers—and how do they add value by enabling smarter, faster and more holistic decisions?
Beyond visibility: Turning awareness into action
Traditional control towers often focused on execution functions such as logistics, order management and manufacturing. With a growing awareness that change is not an exception, companies have renewed their focus on visibility, but only as a means to an end. With fatigue due to alert whiplash, some have worked to infuse outside signals into better, more realistically constrained plans. But like execution-focused control towers, planning control towers may generate a wealth of data that goes unused.
Command centers extend these capabilities to assess, in context, where intervention is needed. They prioritize activity, identify possible corrective action, orchestrate next steps across the multiple parties impacted, and learn from the decisions and actions of key stakeholders.
Together, this puts the power of network-wide data, multi-party architecture and AI capabilities all within the construct of a next generation of control towers. Like their namesake, command centers arm users not only with a 360 view of data, but the key to unlock what it means—and what decision-makers can and should do.
In a 2024 report, IDC offers insight that reinforces the importance of this evolution1. As Eric Thompson writes, “Historically, visibility efforts have not yet realized their full potential. This is in part due to organizational limitations; it's not enough to have real-time visibility without real-time decision-making processes.” He continues, “Organizations with siloed approaches to visibility have begun to complain their visibility itself is realizing limited value. The opportunity is to come at the topic through an integrated approach.”
