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.