Control Tower Supply Chain Management

‘Control Tower’, a much used and abused phrase in the modern supply chain arena.

The origins of the phrase and its analogy should however give us a clue. In the aviation world it implies one or more controllers monitoring and tracking the events of many autonomous transportation movements with the general goal of improving flow, ensuring schedule adherence and avoiding catastrophic events. A deviation of one transportation unit (ie. an aircraft) can have impact on every other, so the controller’s job is to look for conflict and respond rapidly to projected or actual exception events by re-planning and notifying the relevant aircraft. The cost of failure is very high, so understandably this is a very dynamic, fluid and high pressure environment.

All of the very same principles above can be applied to the freight logistics world and although the cost of failure may not be quite so serious, it can be highly disruptive.

The analogy above is how ProAct sees the supply chain landscape – a dynamic, fluid environment which must be constantly monitored at all levels and consequences, predicted or actual, notified immediately in order that resolutions can be applied.

That’s what our software solutions are designed to do.

Key Benefits

Visibility, Planning, Orchestration and Optimisation from one integrated solution

Supporting seamless transition through the multi-modal supply chain including purchase orders, shipments, containers, manifests, service provider bookings and bill of ladings

Sophisticated ‘many-to-many’ shipping model. ie: many shipment lines form many shipments in many containers

SKU level container visibility and inventory management across entire supply chain.

Service provider collaboration and booking capabilities

Single seamless view to all stakeholders across the entire supply chain

Dynamic monitoring and automated exception alerting

Extensive inbound and outbound EDI capabilities

Talk to us…


Either call us on +44 (0)1745 816315 or complete our enquiry form and we’ll get in touch to explain how ProAct could help you.

Watch our Control Tower Solutions video…

EMBRACING THE COMPLEXITY AND DIVERSITY NEEDED FOR TODAY’S CONTAINERISED FREIGHT CHALLENGES

The current so called ‘Control Tower’ software solutions market is made up of a myriad of disparate solutions and technologies patched together via a network of interfaces. These interfaces consist of multiple protocols, multiple formats (both standard and proprietary) and multiple transmission frequencies.

There is NO one owner of the entire supply chain data, NO overriding orchestration or governance of the entire supply chain, NO common collaboration platform , NO seamless visibility and therefore ultimately NO single version of the truth.

Whilst all of these technologies serve a valid purpose, in most, if not all cases, they are far from what we might term as Control Tower technologies and do little in terms of supply chain orchestration. They are typically focused on a single activity within a single mode and reflect little or no relationship to either upstream or downstream events. The event is dealt with in isolation and therefore there is no associated consequence to the event either succeeding or failing.

It is these failings that ProAct has set out to address within it’s unique Control Tower technology.

Train Freight Transportation At Storm - Cargo Transit

A few of the supply chains that have been touched by ProAct software solutions

From the ProAct Solutions user community…

The support and day to day contacts are extremely professional and ensure that all new development is monitored and works to expectation, so that there is no impact to our customer.

Downtime related to software has not been seen by our organization. We have the utmost confidence in this product to maintain our customer needs.

The emphasis on making the software user-friendly recognizes the need for the end-users to be able to use the tool and do their specific jobs.

I like the possibilities of the software growing with our needs as we address expanding pieces of the market.

Find out how ProAct could help your organisation?

For an initial, no-obligation consultation simply complete the form below and we’ll get right back to you.