The New Essential for Supply Chains: Intelligent Execution Control Tower Part I

Editor’s Note: Sundip Naik and Pravesh Kumar, work for Accenture

More than ever, companies today—especially in the wake of COVID-19—recognize how critical supply chain visibility and resiliency are to managing through disruptions and balancing supply and demand. Such increased visibility is also crucial to helping supply chains become more customer-centric, responsive, and agile—moving from “one size fits all” to enriching the customer experience and enabling new ways of meeting unique customer demands as they continue to evolve.

In the quest for visibility and greater customer centricity, more companies have implemented or are considering rolling out a supply chain control tower. Here’s the problem: supply chain control towers, as many companies define them, often fall short of delivering the full value needed to win in today’s environment. Yes, a control tower does provide visibility. But a true supply chain control tower does so much more.

An effective supply chain control tower should include people, process, new ways of working, technology infrastructure, and data that, combined, enable a company to proactively orchestrate across their supply chain functions to increase enterprise value. Referred to as an Intelligent Execution Control Tower (IECT), it goes beyond dashboards, tool implementation, or one-time activities. Instead, an IECT uses a digital twin with intelligent agents to proactively identify disruptions within a near-term execution window and employs advanced computing to intelligently prioritize and respond to exceptions within the operations. It incorporates cross-functional, continuously evolving capabilities and organizational structure that span the value chain to deliver against key goals and metrics.

We’ll cover two of the four elements of an IECT in this article:

• Use Case-Driven Capabilities.
• New Ways of Working.

Use Case-Driven Capabilities A common starting point for companies when implementing a supply chain control tower is to strive for visibility across the end-to-end value chain. But that’s where most companies stop, which is why they won’t get the value they hoped for. Why? Because end-to-end visibility itself isn’t enough. While visibility is certainly a key control tower capability, an IECT’s value comes from taking action based on that enhanced visibility. This could mean, for instance, using AI/ML capabilities to raise alerts and response actions, moving toward orchestrated remediation that streamlines manual tasks and automates wherever possible to execute complex processes more efficiently.

Importantly, at the outset, a company should define a roadmap based on how the IECT will use visibility, alerts, rapid response, and optimized execution to solve cross-functional, use case-driven problems. In fact, we find that the difference between success and failure with a control tower implementation depends on the level of upfront work to identify, define, and value the use cases and overall vision. These use cases should be driven by the business and clearly structured to deliver a strategic business outcome.

Having a full-scope roadmap defined by value-led use cases allows companies to shift their focus from visibility, for the sake of visibility, to creating a new optimized and autonomous supply chain operational capability. It also allows companies to consider applying the control tower across the entire value chain, not just certain functional areas—the latter of which has been the focus of most traditional control towers.

New ways of working. Traditionally, supply chains have been organized and operated in a linear model with roles such as planners, production schedulers, deployment planners, inventory managers, and logistics and manufacturing managers. It’s only at leadership levels that roles look across the whole value chain to manage any trade-offs between functions to deliver an excellent customer experience. This leads to decision making that emphasizes functional excellence at the expense of enterprise value chain excellence. For example, the manufacturing group might decide to freeze production batches to maximize efficiency. But what if there’s an urgent need to meet customer demands for a different product? No role exists that could evaluate the trade-off on a day-to-day basis and decide to do production changeovers to maximize customer service in favor of efficiency.

An IECT breaks from this traditional model by bringing a new ”network planner” role that spans functional siloes and focuses on customer, product, and market. On a day-to-day basis, the network planner has the visibility and authority to make trade-off decisions that result in a superior customer experience and sustainable business value—even if it negatively affects certain functional KPIs and performance drivers.

In addition to potentially new roles, an IECT often requires new skills. For example, the supply chain workforce must be skilled in digital and analytics so their job can become more exception-driven and managed through a well-defined governance model. Supply chain professionals must be able to work effectively alongside AI, ML, and robotic process automation to increase the IECT’s overall business impact, efficiencies, and speed. In fact, this combination of cross-functional knowledge plus advanced analytics skills to “tweak” the engines to solve segmented goals is a key IECT success factor.

In our next article, we’ll discuss the other two elements of an IECT: flexible technology architecture and robust data strategy and governance, which not only allow businesses to remain agile in an ever-changing environment, but also provide the right foundation for the control tower’s future evolution.

Part 2 can be found here.

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