The supply chain continues to substantially transform as businesses become increasingly digitized, global, and networked. Organizations are leveraging a range of systems and partnerships to effectively fulfill orders under tighter timelines and the pressures of greater customer and consumer demands.

Supply chain Control Towers are one of the most recognized and sought-after solutions for enhancing collaborations and unifying disparate systems through end-to-end, real-time visibility and control. Unfortunately, not all supply chain Control Towers are created equal, and when software providers refer to "Control Towers," they aren't all referring to the same capabilities. In fact, many of the most modern technologies lack comprehensive visibility and in-app control and tend to perpetuate organizational silos.

This white paper charts the evolution of the Control Tower as a means to embrace and extract value from today’s newfound supply chain complexity. The paper investigates some of the most significant ways solutions vary, such as analytic versus operational, as well as the crucial ways Control Towers can vary in scope, flexibility, and functionality. By highlighting the right questions to ask and considerations to make for both present and future challenges, the paper will help you identify how best to select and implement the right solution for your business needs.

In recent years, the supply chain industry has undergone significant changes. With the advent of e-commerce, businesses are under increasing pressure to keep pace with growing customer demands, shorter product lifecycles, and global competition. Multi-enterprise business networks have been an effective first step to meeting these challenges and leveraging the vast potential of this new landscape.

However, in many ways, the industry has also plateaued. While supply chain business networks and delivery models must continuously morph and adapt to cope with ever-changing market demands, most transportation management systems in use today are modeled on obsolete frameworks from the 1990s. They lack the flexibility to respond to today's dynamic needs and pressures and they tend to perpetuate organizational silos.

This white paper will delve deeper into the various challenges facing the modern supply chain, including globalization, consumer pressures, and the disruption of geopolitical change. The paper will also detail what these obsolete frameworks are, why they continue to occur in even the most modern solutions, and how they hold businesses back from succeeding in today’s multifaceted and networked reality. Finally, the paper offers a new perspective on the current situation, as well as an effective solution for a twenty-first century TMS.

Detailed location technology can have a significant impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of supply chains. Here are four ways in which the technology can prove critical to business operations.

Transportation and the supply chain play a critical role in ensuring the safety of food as it moves from farm to the ultimate consumer, says Wilbur Deck, solutions engineer with Trimble.