Next step: from control tower to command centre

Despite the turbulence in supply chains, the adoption of end-to-end supply chain visibility lags behind expectations. To find out more, consulting firm BCI Global and Supply Chain Media surveyed 123 supply chain executives about their motivations and challenges. What emerged? The vast majority really do need end-to-end visibility, and would ideally like to take things even further.

Pharmaceutical manufacturers see it as their social responsibility to provide patients with medicines on time. But sometimes supply chain disruptions lead to the limited availability of a medicine. In that case, who gets the product first?

To resolve these kinds of issues faster and better, an international pharmaceutical company launched a digital transformation project in 2017. The goal: realization of end-to-end supply chain visibility through a logistics control tower. However, it soon became clear that Supply Chain could not solve these issues alone. The company’s ability and speed to meet demand is of course one important factor, but there are more factors at play: e.g. customer agreements, local laws and regulations, financial implications and the way in which the disappointing news is communicated. The company discovered that a cross-functional team was needed to make quick and effective decisions.

This resulted in the decision several years ago to build a command centre on top of the control towers for logistics, production and quality, among other things. This command centre consists of a team featuring not only people from Supply Chain, but also from the Marketing, Sales and Finance departments. Based on input from the control towers, this command centre is able to make and execute decisions at lightning speed.

To describe what the command centre in the above example actually does, consultancy Buck Consultants International (BCI Global) uses the term “end-to-end supply chain orchestration”. As many as 70% of supply chain executives hope to have the necessary competences for this by 2027. … … …

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