A supply chain control tower is a powerful tool that provides real-time visibility across your entire supply chain. By feeding the system with data, you can identify problems, mitigate risks, and make informed decisions—ultimately enabling you to implement sustainable initiatives and reduce ESG risks. Let’s explore how you can leverage your data to build a robust control tower.
Gain control of the supply chain
What is a supply chain control tower?
A supply chain control tower is a centralized dashboard that consolidates data and events from across the supply chain. It offers end-to-end visibility, providing a clear overview of suppliers, providers, and freight forwarders—all within a user-friendly platform.
By harnessing real-time data, businesses can anticipate disruptions, plan for uncertainties, and gain control over hidden risks. Whether dealing with external factors like weather conditions or internal challenges such as production faults, a control tower provides a complete picture—helping businesses respond proactively and effectively.
This makes a supply chain control tower an essential tool for understanding, prioritizing, and swiftly resolving challenges, ensuring supply chain resilience and efficiency.
How do supply chain control towers work?
Supply chain control towers gather data from all supply chain processes, integrating information from barcodes, sensors, weather forecasts, and traffic conditions. This data is then combined with operational functions, such as inventory management, manufacturing, and transportation, creating a comprehensive, real-time overview of supply chain activities.
By leveraging both digital automation and manual oversight, control towers provide real-time insights that help businesses anticipate disruptions, optimize operations, and mitigate risks effectively.
A well-functioning supply chain control tower goes beyond visibility—it identifies issues, predicts potential scenarios, and prioritizes responses. Whether your goal is cost reduction or business innovation, a robust control tower equips you with the tools to make data-driven decisions and achieve optimal results.
Enhance control with the CEMAsys End-to-End Solution
A robust supply chain control tower is essential for efficient supply chain management. With CEMAsys, you gain deeper insights into challenges and opportunities, enabling smarter decision-making. Our end-to-end solution enhances performance, mitigates ESG risks, and helps reduce your carbon footprint.
Want to optimize your supply chain?
Check out the CEMAsys Software
Data in supply chain control tower
Data is the foundation of an effective supply chain control tower, enabling end-to-end visibility and informed decision-making. A smart control tower leverages data in various ways, including:
- Predictive analysis: Identify potential risks and opportunities through what-if scenarios.
- Demand and supply planning: Anticipate customer needs and manage fluctuations effectively.
- Enhanced collaboration: Improve coordination between providers, suppliers, and manufacturers.
- Process optimization: Streamline operations and reduce costs while meeting customer demands.
Different types of control towers
Data-driven insights enable the creation of various control towers, such as logistical, operational, and sustainability-focused control towers. In the realm of ESG reporting, a control tower provides analytical oversight of operations impacting environmental, social, and governance efforts.
With real-time visibility, businesses can proactively identify and mitigate environmental and social risks, optimize transportation routes, reduce waste, and enhance supplier communication. Additionally, control towers improve resilience against unforeseen disruptions, making supply chains more adaptable to market fluctuations.
How to build a supply chain control tower?
Building a supply chain control tower begins with feeding the system high-quality, detailed data. The more accurate and comprehensive the data, the better the control tower can identify risks and uncover opportunities within the supply chain.
Next, it’s crucial that this data is not only accessible but also actionable. To ensure it can be used effectively, the data must be relevant to operational activities. For example, if your goal is to reduce ESG risks, you need to gather data from every stakeholder and conduct related surveys to fully understand the potential risks. This data should meet industry standards, such as GRI standards, ensuring compliance and thorough risk management.
Benefits of using a software for controlling the supply chain
Control tower software is a powerful tool for digitizing and managing supply chain processes. It integrates all activities within a unified network of manufacturers, suppliers, and operators, automating manual tasks and streamlining operations.
By using this software, you gain the ability to identify and act on issues and opportunities in real time. The comprehensive data powering the control tower allows you to prioritize issues based on risk impact, conduct scenario-based analyses, and make informed decisions.
Key benefits include:
- Identify problems: Whether they’re related to your ERP system, order management, or ESG surveys, the software will alert you to potential issues.
- Decide: Data-driven analyses and predictions provide the clarity needed to make well-informed decisions on how to address problems.
- Act: With a complete view of your supply chain, including insights into challenges and the potential impact of your decisions, you can make confident, strategic choices.
Example: Our Supply Chain Control module
Many supply chain control tower solutions include modules that help manage tasks and ensure compliance at every stage. The SCC module in CEMAsys software provides an end-to-end solution for supply chain control, with dedicated features for ESG management.
With this module, you can measure environmental risks and track compliance with internal requirements. From here you can create and distribute surveys to stakeholders for data collection. As for the supply chain, you can implement risk maps to categorize suppliers and assess their risk levels. This enables suppliers to track, analyze, and share their progress, fostering transparency.
Advantages of having a supply chain control tower
Control costs
With full visibility across your supply chain, you can better plan to reduce risks and optimize costs. A control tower provides a complete cost overview, including hidden expenses related to customers, storage, and transportation.
Audit stakeholders
Efficiently audit suppliers and stakeholders to identify ESG risks across your organization. Benchmark suppliers based on their ESG performance and rate them accordingly, ensuring compliance and sustainability.
Increase agility
Stay compliant and conduct proactive risk assessments to mitigate supply chain disruptions and adapt to changes in customer demand.
Sustainable forecasting
Leverage what-if scenarios and predictive analyses to make informed decisions, reduce waste, and optimize resource use—minimizing manpower, materials, and emissions.
Eliminate blind spots
A control tower removes operational blind spots by consolidating vast amounts of real-time data. Gain full visibility and control over every stage of the supply chain, from sourcing raw materials to delivering finished products.
Try our Supply Chain Control (SCC) Solution
Reduce risks, save costs and drive business innovation with a powerful SCC solution. Our user-friendly system simplifies supply chain tracking and management—giving you complete oversight of your operations.
Try our end-to-end solution
