Mike Landry, president of Barkawi Management Consultants, North America, explains the "control tower" approach to supply chain management and why he believes this approach can enable companies to go beyond incremental improvements to real transformational change.

Even in today's data-hungry analytics environment, collecting and keeping every tiny granule of retail data - down to the level of each individual transaction and web click - might seem like overkill. But Sears Holdings has discovered that data storage costs have gotten low enough, and analytical tools have grown powerful enough, that this approach to Big Data has shortened the time needed for analytics projects by 60 percent to 70 percent, while also improving promotion conversions, lowering inventory levels and boosting sales.

When integrating its two major business units, First Solar partnered with Kinaxis to provide supply and demand planning capabilities, says Shellie Molina, vice president-global supply chain.

At the same time that supply chains are becoming increasingly global and complex, customers are expecting faster than ever service, says Vijay Subramanian, president of Prana Consulting.

Breaking down functional silos to create transparent and responsive end-to-end supply chains has long been an intractable supply chain challenge, but many companies are finding success using a control tower concept that gets everyone working off the same plan and focused on the same outcome. To learn more about this approach, SupplyChainBrain convened a Power Lunch"”a roundtable discussion"”with four experts in the field: Paul Bittinger, former supply chain transformation manager, Procter & Gamble (now retired); Lora Cecere, founder and CEO, Supply Chain Insights; Don Gaspari, director, global materials and inventory, NCR Corp.; and Kirk Munroe, vice president of marketing, Kinaxis.