From the course: Implementing Supply Chain Management

Increase visibility with a control tower

From the course: Implementing Supply Chain Management

Increase visibility with a control tower

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- Supply chain management involves three steps. Planning, execution, and visibility. Visibility might be the most valuable of the three because the more you know about what's really happening in your supply chain, the better decisions you can make about what to do next. But visibility can also be the most challenging step. So let's dive in and look at how to increase the visibility in your supply chain. We can start by looking at one of our supply chain processes. Let's choose source, and say that you want visibility to inbound orders from one of your suppliers. In order to really know what's going on with an inbound shipment, you need purchase order information from your systems, shipping schedules from your supplier systems and status updates from your carriers. In other words, you need to integrate information from at least three systems in order to get visibility for that one link in your supply chain. There are platforms that can tie different information systems together and they're called supply chain control towers. Control towers make it a lot easier to build scorecards and dashboards and they can also generate business intelligence. For example, control towers can highlight opportunities for process improvement and help you manage risk and disruptions. Having a supply chain control tower makes it easier to manage your supply chain, but building a control tower can be hard. The first challenge is finding and getting access to the data you need. The second challenge is data quality, because there are often gaps and errors in big databases. And the third problem is latency or the delay between when an activity occurs and when you have visibility to it. When you can see a transaction instantly, then you have realtime visibility, and the closer you can come to realtime visibility, the better off you are because you don't want to be making important decisions based on out of date information. A good place to start thinking about how much visibility you have today is to list all of the information systems that you use based on the supply chain processes they support. If you have access to the exercise files you can download a template of this chart to help you get started. Supply chain visibility is really a journey. You have to decide what information you need, where to get it and how to tie it together in ways that are useful. When you have a control tower in place, it's much easier for people to identify and respond to issues. And the sooner you know about an issue, the more options you have to deal with it and the less it will cost you.

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