What is a Supply Chain Control Tower?
What is a supply chain control tower?
A supply chain control tower takes a 360 degree view of all your operations - you are planning, executing and measuring everything that is going on within a shipping operation.
What is the difference between a control tower and visibility?
Visibility is a piece of your operation - to us it is where the truck/goods are in transit. The control tower is actionable - it takes the data component and provides some action to it. The control tower can be a piece of data but it can also have people working in unison with a piece of software. The control tower tends to be a blend of both technology and human components.
What type of operational functionality does a control tower provide an operation team?
The first thing the control tower functions in saving labor and time. You can now have a system getting rates, making tenders and tracking in an automated fashion. Putting computer processes on this saves people and allows them to put that time back into their day. It also allows companies to see trends much easier and faster.
What type of analytical insights does a control tower provide?
The control tower reports and analyzes on anything that is happening. It also establishes digital connections to tie all pieces of shipping together. This is a comprehensive and holistic approach that in theory you are establishing digital connections to all partners.
Differences between a Saas (Software as a service) approach to transportation and a control tower approach?
Both the operational functions and analytics insights seem achievable with other transportation software, what is the value that a shipper can gain from the holistic control tower approach?
- Integration difficulty
- Cost of on-boarding
- Technology maintenance requires a higher skill set than typically lead to believe
- Overloaded with individual systems data making it useless
At Aborn there is a hybrid approach to the control tower, how does this work?
Aborn created a hybrid approach to the control tower. The company works with a combination of software and service, blending a 4PL offering with control tower capabilities. Aborn provides a traditional fourth-party logistics offering with fully managed transportation service but also includes the control tower tech stack allowing for complete control at your fingertips.
If Aborn is handling the freight, why is it important for an ops team to have the control tower capabilities?
It allows the operation team on the company to think strategically and have the utmost confidence in their decision backed by audited data. Aborn is not a software company but uses TMS (EDI, API, etc.) in conjunction with different functionalities of human teams to support the software. At the end of the day Aborn is the control tower for the companies it works with giving them a lot more insights and consolidation and allows them to repurpose and be more strategic with their people.



