A Career in Logistics: Jobs, Skills and Growth Tips
Today's supply chain leaders face a critical challenge: meeting rising customer expectations for speed and visibility while managing increasingly complex logistics networks. Without real-time insight into every link of the supply chain, your business risks costly delays, missed deliveries, and eroded customer trust.
The future of supply chain management is driven by customer demand. Your business requires adaptability and speed to meet the market's needs. With higher expectations for speedy deliveries, you can find the edge you seek by investing in control towers.
In this blog post, we'll explore what a control tower is, the types that exist, and how they work to improve supply chain management.
What is a Control Tower?
The term 'control tower' is used flippantly to mean different operations or levels of control, but often its definition is not clear-cut. Let's start with what control towers are not.
They are not physical buildings overseeing operations in the sky like the control towers at airports, but their purpose is similar. A control tower is a piece of software, or a suite of software that is used to provide end-to-end visibility across the supply chain, collect and analyze large amounts of data, and use predictive and prescriptive analytics to automate decision making and exception resolution.
The purpose of a control tower is to give a greater level of control and knowledge of the entire picture to every link of the supply chain. Control towers use cloud-based intelligence and predictive analytics to not only detect problems but learn the best course of action to diagnose the issue and prevent it from happening again.
The revolutionary push from reactive to proactive action is the heart of control towers. As the ability to analyze data from your supply chain develops, so too will a control tower’s ability to learn and maximize efficiency from origin to destination and everything in between.
What are the Benefits of a Supply Chain Control Tower?
End-to-End Visibility
As a supply chain professional, you know that exceptions happen. Emergency shipments, delays, road work, inclement weather, sudden loss of inventory... exceptions have many faces.
Ultimately, they come in part from a lack of E2E visibility. Control towers act as a freight visibility platform, detecting exceptions in real-time so the time between exceptions and resolutions is minimized. Shortening the time it takes to identify and resolve exceptions not only enhances performance but also reduces the overall cost of operations.
Reduced Costs
It's clear to see how information communicated and shared between, say, the shipper sending goods and the trucker guaranteeing availability on arrival can translate into shorter delivery time and lower costs.
Let's say a shipment is stalled at the destination for something the shipper did not include on the Bill of Lading. It might take at least one business for the issue to be assessed and handled, another business day to resolve and pay demurrage charges at destination. With a control tower and the right parameters, exceptions can be caught before arrival to prevent loss of time and money at destination.
Shared Communication
Control towers will also allow all partners, shippers, carriers, and suppliers included, to gain access to information and shared data to better understand the collective process and where exceptions exist, and how they can be remedied.
Increased Productivity
Using the power of data and predictive technology, control towers can not only spot exceptions along the supply chain, but they can also diagnose and prescribe solutions in real-time. This allows you to work smarter, not harder. Control towers will also adapt and continuously learn more efficient practices, meaning continuous improvement will no longer be constrained by manual hours of research and ineffective procedures. You'll no longer need to implement a new procedure and 'see' if it works.
Autonomous Decision Making
This is the MVP feature of control towers and could be the future of the entire supply chain industry. It’s one thing to collect data, analyze it, run scenarios and come up with a prescription to optimize efficiency and minimize costs. But without any action, it’s just data and a plan of action dependent on human intervention to execute.
Control towers take this information and execute it automatically, essentially implementing the most effective strategy on its own. This level of autonomy would revolutionize your business with the power of data and information that previously would have taken hundreds of human hours in research in a fraction of the time.
What are the Types of Control Towers?
Before we get to the specifics, it’s important to understand that control towers are not created equally. Understanding the types that exist can help you better understand which type of control tower will benefit your business the most. There are two different classes of control towers based on their functions...
Analytical Control Towers
achieve the analytical portion of their purpose. They consolidate data, diagnose exceptions and prescribe outcomes based on their required parameters.
For example, an analytical control tower may be used to predict the most cost-efficient truck route based on historical data of average time to destination. Other data can also be aggregated, such as a companies’ on-time delivery track record and average fuel usage.
Analytical control towers cannot, however, act on said data. They cannot autonomously execute any plan based on data alone, thus there must still be someone to see the data and make a decision.
Operational Control Towers
use predictive analytics to not only generate optimal outcomes but also implement them automatically. Now that we’ve seen the two classes of control towers, we can go into the types of control towers that exist.
Now, let's take a look at how these two types play out when applied to logistics...
Transportation-Focused
These control towers analyze data and implement actions based solely on the transportation portion of the supply chain. They do not aggregate data from the shipper, carriers, or other legs of the supply chain and instead focus on deliveries, tracking and tracing, on-time delivery, and work closely with a TMS.
Exceptions can only be analyzed if they happen during transportation. They are limited in design but can still serve many companies who do not yet have the infrastructure for a Supply Chain focused control tower. For example, a transportation-focused control tower can analyze the fastest route to destination and would automatically download the route to transportation and constantly update for faster routes. It could not, however, predict if production at the manufacturer has slowed due to low inventory and causes delay at the origin.
Supply Chain-Focused
These control towers can provide true end-to-end visibility and control, taking data from the Shipper, Carriers, Manufacturers, Suppliers, Inventory, Transportation, and Sales. This control tower is much more powerful and complex as it can detect exceptions among every level of the supply chain and prescribe processes that optimize efficiency and reduce costs down the line.
For example, a supply chain-focused control tower can detect if sales has placed a large order to the manufacturer but Inventory levels dictate that the purchase will result in an excess of parts.
Final Thoughts
Control towers can push your business to the next level with autonomous decision-making and end-to-end visibility—capabilities that Redwood's Modern 4PL approach delivers through integrated technology and supply chain orchestration. Implementing control towers is no easy task, and without a streamlined infrastructure, may only yield suboptimal results. Also, true automation is far from the norm of our current technology.
However, the benefits of implementing control towers far outweigh the cost to upgrade your infrastructure. Control towers are proof that automation and data are the future of the global supply chain industry. To learn more about how these capabilities fit into a comprehensive logistics strategy, download our Modern 4PL for Dummies guide.
FAQs
What is a supply chain control tower?
A supply chain control tower is software, or a suite of software, that provides end-to-end visibility across the supply chain. It collects and analyzes large amounts of data, then uses predictive and prescriptive analytics to detect exceptions, recommend actions, and in some cases automate decision-making. Unlike a physical control tower, it is a digital system designed to improve control, speed, and coordination across logistics networks.
How does a supply chain control tower cut delays?
A supply chain control tower cuts delays by spotting exceptions in real time and resolving them earlier in the process. Instead of waiting until a shipment reaches the destination and problems surface, the system can flag issues before arrival, such as missing bill of lading details or route disruptions. That shortens the time between exception detection and correction, which helps reduce late deliveries and related costs.
What is the difference between an analytical and an operational control tower?
An analytical control tower consolidates data, diagnoses exceptions, and recommends outcomes, but it does not execute actions automatically. An operational control tower does both: it uses predictive analytics to identify the best response and then implements that response on its own. The key difference is autonomy, with operational control towers going beyond analysis into automatic execution.
What is the difference between a transportation-focused and a supply chain-focused control tower?
A transportation-focused control tower looks only at transportation activities such as delivery tracking, route optimization, and on-time performance. A supply chain-focused control tower pulls data from shippers, carriers, manufacturers, suppliers, inventory, transportation, and sales, giving true end-to-end visibility. That broader view lets it detect exceptions across the full network, not just during transit.
How do control towers reduce supply chain costs?
Control towers reduce supply chain costs by catching problems earlier and preventing avoidable downstream expenses. For example, if a shipment is missing information on the bill of lading, the issue can be identified before arrival instead of after the freight stalls at destination and accrues demurrage. Faster exception handling also reduces wasted time, rework, and manual intervention.
Why is shared communication important in a supply chain control tower?
Shared communication is important because it gives shippers, carriers, suppliers, and other partners access to the same data and exception status. That improves coordination, helps everyone understand where disruptions exist, and makes it easier to fix issues quickly. A control tower works best when the network is operating from a common view of the shipment and the supply chain.
Is a supply chain control tower the same as a freight visibility platform?
A supply chain control tower includes freight visibility, but it goes beyond visibility alone. A freight visibility platform focuses on seeing where shipments are and detecting exceptions, while a control tower also analyzes data, prescribes actions, and may automate decisions. In other words, visibility is a key function, but the control tower adds intelligence and orchestration.
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