Project : Logistics Control Tower
Objective: To design a Logistics Control Tower Solution for E-Commerce Companies
Write-up:
A control tower is a single command centre for visibility, decision-making, and action, based on real-time data. It’s a powerful cloud service providing a comprehensive unified prospective of your business; top-down to bottom-up. Cross functional team can now rely on a single product to plan, monitor and respond to all business challenges (in this case all issues occur in logistics) quickly, collaboratively enabling you to measure the impact of changes, study response scenario, recalibrate strategies and envision what’s coming down the road, allowing you to see and know it all at the same time. With the help of control tower, Company (and supply chain) will come to be recognized not as a collection of separate functions but as a system in which the flows of information, materials, manpower, capital equipment, and money setup forces that determine the basic tendencies towards growth, fluctuation, and decline. A Supply Chain Control Tower system includes a dedicated team of people responsible for monitoring the alerts of the tower and for taking action when the tower predicts an incident may happen or if an incident already happened. This designated team is delegated the authority to make real time decisions based on the alerts and recommendations reported by the Control Tower. A properly structured Control Tower must be “armed with both the ability to determine the downstream and upstream effects or impacts and whether they exceed acceptable control tolerance very quickly, and the ability to determine who needs to know very quickly”. The team dedicated to the tower should be well experienced in different sectors of a company’s supply chain. It is important that the Control Tower team be independent from all other business units in order to avoid conflict of interests when executing Control Tower decisions. The biggest challenge behind the Supply Chain Control Tower team is that, “Being a multi-organization entity, the Supply Chain Control Tower must resolve issues in the best interests of all the members (all of whom have different objectives). Having information is great, but the success of the Supply Chain Control Tower is multi-enterprise collaboration”. Also, mapping out the processes within an enterprise’s supply chain to document how each workflow should be performed. This is critical since the Control Tower will need parameters to judge what is an exception to normal levels as well as instruction on how to handle a situation deemed out of tolerance. In addition, the proper technology must be in place to support Supply Chain Control Tower functions. This includes networking ERP systems, customer and supplier systems, and other hubs of information in order for all systems to share information with Supply Chain Control Tower. The technology element of the Supply Chain Control Tower structure must also be able to handle the immense amount of data exchanged in between the various hubs of information.
Designing of control tower process is given below:

Planning your control tower transformation ‘journey’ should include several important tasks, including:
• Define and prioritize company goals and KPIs
• Assess the current position and potential against these priorities
• Identify and compare improvement strategies or initiatives
Select “tactical” quick wins that can help you prove and deliver your business case, funding your transformation program as you go. These decisions shorten time-to-value - whether it is improving forecast accuracy, supply performance, optimizing inventory, or maximizing on-time delivery. An unbridled drive for “real-time” data is of particular concern with control towers and perhaps one of the most avoidable implementation pitfalls. Data requirements can be easily over-engineered, chasing “real-time” when what you actually need is “right-time” information. The former is much more difficult and costly to implement and maintain. Furthermore, it can introduce “noise” into your decision processes that actually obscures discovery of actionable insights by a human decision-maker. In contrast, “right-time” focuses on providing data at a frequency that is in phase with the decision-maker’s “plan-do-check-act” decision cycle. Functionality overload is also a problem so keep things simple and moving forward by narrowing the scope of the employee to focus on the out-of-the-box capabilities of your solution. This will allow you to assess process fit and change management requirements. Doing so will help you determine which customizations are truly needed. Furthermore, focusing on these standard features internally first - e.g. within one division, function or region - and then extending to others and/or external partners can help narrow the initial data integration and change management requirements. Throughout maturation, experience, learning, improvements and value enable the control tower scope to expand, eliminating information silos and enhancing the ability to respond to exceptions of increasing complexity. Through a control tower system, logistics providers can offer customers important benefits – such as rigorous monitoring of each operation – that ensure the efficient use of all transportation. This 24/7 coverage of every location allows logistics companies to act quickly in case of disruptions and offer advanced, real-time reporting that ultimately gives their customers piece of mind that their supply chains are in good hands.