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

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

As discussed in part one of this series, in the wake of COVID-19, companies are realizing how critical visibility across the supply chain is and the need to respond at speed. By implementing an Intelligent Execution Control Tower (IECT), this not only helps companies focus on customer-centricity, but also allows them to be generally more responsive and agile in meeting customer demands. In the first part of this discussion, we covered the first two main elements of an ICET, use case-driven capabilities and new ways of working.

In this article, we focus on the other two aspects that allow businesses to manage through disruptions and more effectively balance supply and demand:

• Flexible Technology Architecture.
• Robust Data Strategy and Governance.

Flexible Technical Architecture. It’s a fact of life: Just as businesses change, so do technology landscapes in the market. New capabilities will arise that can drive business value; unanticipated disruptions can upend operations; and competitor moves and challenges can create unforeseen opportunities. Because of this, an IECT isn’t a plug-and-play capability. It needs a dedicated technology framework, which is not a company’s ERP or planning tool. To evolve over time with the business, an IECT needs to be built on a flexible architecture of decoupled systems, which enables it to easily scale to additional entities and use cases, and shift as business needs change.

This flexible architecture is defined by several distinct components:

• A data stream and data lake to capture real-time data on a hyper-scalable cloud platform that provides the foundation for the control tower’s agile evolution over time and eliminates inter-dependencies.
• A robust data ingestion and integrity layer, which is a centralized platform that captures data from multiple sources and ensures data consistency.
• A framework that provides true visibility and alerts across internal and external supply chains to provide early warning and time to respond.
• Intelligent rapid response engine that analyzes changes, assesses impacts, and uses scenario modeling and advanced analytics to create optimized responses.
• Intelligent automation that coordinates execution of decisions across the operational landscape.

Because these capabilities will continue to evolve over time, a company must be able to quickly and continuously take advantage of fast-maturing solutions in the market. This is a very different model and mindset from the historical enterprise solution deployments of the past, which relied on long implementation timelines.

Robust Data Strategy and Governance. One reason companies often struggle to make progress on their control tower journeys is because they’re obsessed with getting “perfect” data, which never comes. An IECT is highly adept at ingesting, transforming, and working with less-than-perfect data while highlighting data quality issues and directing efforts to improve data integrity, with a focus on the critical data required for different decisions.

Thus, a robust data strategy and governance is critical. Data strategy helps to ensure that the architecture serves the overall goals of the business. It should define what, where, and how data—both structured and unstructured, and internal and external—will be sourced, normalized, and integrated with downstream systems and into the IECT. Data migration methods, data quality and governance, and data security are also key elements of an IECT’s data foundation.

Rolling Out an IECT: a Hybrid Approach

Building an IECT is only half the battle. Companies often struggle to define an implementation approach that generates anticipated benefits or shows progress quickly. They spend too much time and money building a visibility-focused control tower that doesn’t deliver actionable insights. Often, they start by building a functional control tower, typically in logistics or planning. Doing so can improve the target function’s performance, but it can come at the expense of other functions’ KPIs (for example, lower labor costs in warehousing versus lower trailer utilization and increased dwell time/detention).

Because an IECT is use-case driven, it’s highly modular and is typically implemented through agile sprints of use cases. However, multiple implementation options exist, depending on the goal. Leading companies follow a hybrid approach based on business use cases and the building of capabilities over time. The hybrid approach builds scale (in terms of additional entities, regions, or functional areas) while adding depth (in terms of visibility, alerts, and response) – one release at a time. This approach, grounded in agile principles, generates value quickly while gradually strengthening and expanding the organization’s capabilities.

IECTs, when implemented effectively, are rapidly changing how supply chains are managed. They certainly provide visibility into a company’s operations. But they also enable a company to act on what it’s seeing. The company can use the IECT’s insights to drive strategic business outcomes for each micro-segment of the market while gradually moving toward an optimized and autonomous supply chain.

As companies find themselves increasingly relying on their supply chains to become a more customer-centric growth engine, an Intelligent Execution Control Tower has become a fundamental, “must-have” capability. It’s what companies need to thrive and survive in an era of evolving consumer expectations, availability of new disruptive technologies, and the growth of new business models. It’s a new way to manage the supply chain and drive enterprise value—and it’s long overdue.

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