Control towers were a foundational step change when they first emerged. Like their namesake, they offered the promise of 360° views, monitoring potential risks and chokepoints in flows. But the pace and complexity of supply chains continue to evolve—and organizations now need the next generation of control towers to master today’s variability, volatility and interconnectivity.

It’s important to identify a disruptive event as quickly as possible. But visibility is just the first step. How do you respond? What parts of your operation are impacted? How do you quickly identify dependencies outside your domain—whether across functions or beyond your four walls? How do you weigh options and pull the best available levers in coordination with your trading partners? Does the predicted impact even warrant intervention, and how will change ripple through other activities? And how do you create a self-learning, self-healing environment in which change informs both future plans so they’re more feasibly constrained, and execution to reduce firefighting?

Reactive by design, traditional control towers fail to address the interconnected, network-wide nature of modern supply chain operations.

The good news is that next-generation control tower capabilities are available to raise the ante on visibility, embedding collaboration with context for each decision-maker, and seamlessly driving action. But how do today’s command centers differ from traditional control towers—and how do they add value by enabling smarter, faster and more holistic decisions?

Beyond visibility: Turning awareness into action

Traditional control towers often focused on execution functions such as logistics, order management and manufacturing. With a growing awareness that change is not an exception, companies have renewed their focus on visibility, but only as a means to an end. With fatigue due to alert whiplash, some have worked to infuse outside signals into better, more realistically constrained plans. But like execution-focused control towers, planning control towers may generate a wealth of data that goes unused.

Command centers extend these capabilities to assess, in context, where intervention is needed. They prioritize activity, identify possible corrective action, orchestrate next steps across the multiple parties impacted, and learn from the decisions and actions of key stakeholders.

Together, this puts the power of network-wide data, multi-party architecture and AI capabilities all within the construct of a next generation of control towers. Like their namesake, command centers arm users not only with a 360° view of data, but the key to unlock what it means—and what decision-makers can and should do.

In a 2024 report, IDC offers insight that reinforces the importance of this evolution[1]. As Eric Thompson writes, “Historically, visibility efforts have not yet realized their full potential. This is in part due to organizational limitations; it’s not enough to have real-time visibility without real-time decision-making processes.” He continues, “Organizations with siloed approaches to visibility have begun to complain their visibility itself is realizing limited value. The opportunity is to come at the topic through an integrated approach.”

Four advantages of a modern supply chain command center

Today, solutions like Blue Yonder’s Supply Chain Command Center are changing everything. Backed by the power of AI, they can identify meaningful change, recommend potential corrective action, and ultimately orchestrate a response across impacted network parties.

Command centers offer four key advantages over traditional control towers:

  1. Focus on action, not just visibility. Unlike traditional systems that rely on integrations, a modern command center taps into network data on inventories and capacities, supply and demand imbalances, across the nodes of the extended supply chain. With user-specific context, network-wide state of the supply chain access enables detection of meaningful change, reducing latency in generating insights. Learning recommendation engines generate possible responses or feed back into source systems.
  2. Holistic, looking across functions, connecting multiple tiers of value chain participants, and breaking down artificial walls between logistics and planning.While traditional control towers were often siloed in approach, Blue Yonder’s Supply Chain Command Center provides access to permissioned slices of shared network data. Each participant can directly tap into information in context to their role and decision making. While legacy approaches reflect linear or sequential decisioning, this next generation enables a true multi-party approach so networks can pivot in coordination, dynamically reflecting current needs and capacities.
  3. Proactive rather than reactive firefighting. Leveraging embedded advanced modeling techniques and automated risk analyses, next-gen control towers cascade impact along end-to-end processes. Metrics like service-level agreements (SLAs), total delivered cost or revenue growth may remain the driving objective function, but this also enables a broader understanding of impact on additional imperatives such as sustainability, regulatory, or new product initiatives.
  4. Antifragile. For the last few years, the need for resilience to disruption has been at the fore of supply chain discussions. Control towers sought to address this with earlier warnings across the ecosystem. But where resilient systems resist shocks, antifragile ones get stronger, inherently more adaptive. As a command center, this next-generation approach seeks to take systems beyond prescribed responses to enable Blue Yonder Network participants to adjust to previously unforeseen or unknown environments. In other words, to be cognitive.

The importance of network-wide orchestration

At Blue Yonder, we believe an informed, network-wide solution is essential to thrive in today’s connected, complex business landscape. Synchronized orchestration across the network enables operations to better fuel profitable growth in the face of disruption, variability and change.

In late 2024, McKinsey launched their annual Global Supply Chain Leader Survey. In it they noted that while companies continue to improve their understanding of direct suppliers, visibility into deeper levels of the supply chain fell 7% from the prior year, the second such annual decline. At the same time, inventory buffers were no longer viewed as a preferred way to mitigate associated risks. Isolated initiatives to improve resilience had delivered disappointing results.

The growing pressure for better transparency in deep-tier supply chains also reflects emerging regulations and other external risk drivers. For example, despite already being in force for some, 30% of survey participants admitted they were behind or significantly behind in compliance efforts with the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive. This doesn’t even touch on how companies should best address uncertainty surrounding topics like tariffs.

Together, these trends raise the need for a command center-type approach in which multi-party network architecture foundationally supports adaptive operational flows.

Improve your network-wide responsiveness today

Blue Yonder’s Supply Chain Command Center leverages the Blue Yonder Network to tap perpetual inventory, capacity, and demand flows; identify imbalances; and empower a coordinated response. It’s built not just to flag shifts, but to reveal how they impact complex, multi-enterprise supply chain processes—and close the gap between planning and execution.

Ready to leave traditional control tower approaches behind and achieve next-gen results? Learn more about how Blue Yonder can help you transform visibility into action.

[1] IDC, So What Do I Do with All This Visibility?, Doc #US51710623, April, 2024