The new normal for control towers

Early versions of control towers were originally developed within supply chain management solutions to improve visibility across far-flung ecosystems of suppliers, distributors, and partner operations. This clarity helped customers mitigate the negative effects of external disruptions, but a large amount of manual work was still required to drive tangible benefits. Increased demand for supply chain resilience and operational agility has led vendors to expand the scope of control tower functionalities beyond tracking and logistics to forecasting and process optimization. Control towers must now be capable of functioning as an end-to-end clearinghouse for organizational planning and execution, with the ability to automatically identify problems and suggest corrective actions.