Food and beverage companies are concerned about the supply chain and rising consumer pricing.
Problems seem to happen more often, which is why the idea of control towers is so popular. Find out what is going on and how it affects your business, then decide what to do.
By changing how we think about the traditional control tower, we can make better decisions and reach our goals.
Executives, analysts, and partners are becoming increasingly aware of the need to make better business decisions and stay on track to reach strategic goals. All of this is possible because of Certus’s solutions.
“Stuff happens”, and the old way of doing things
To be ready for “stuff to happen,” you need to know what is going on at every level of your supply chain, understand how it affects other departments, make decisions quickly, and monitor and improve the outcomes in real-time.
The traditional way of trying this with multiple control towers for different departments and an extra control tower to tie them all together will not work. Traditional methods lead to more decisions made in silos and less-than-ideal results.
These may look good on the operational scorecard of a department, but they hurt the overall business goals.
A different way to think
A new way of thinking must be flexible enough to take advantage of growth opportunities and strong enough to deal with today’s risks. Get rid of the silos and layers and replace them with a robust operations platform. Say what now?
An operations platform will:
- bring together all the data you need to see what is going on, along with all the applications
- artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics, you need to understand what disruptions mean for the business
- recommendations for the best course of action. Put decisions into action, and then learn for the next time
These control tower features are brought together on a single operating platform for your food and beverage business by Certus. It gives you the data, apps, and AI you need to achieve new levels of agility and resilience.
The world’s most extensive network powers this strategic platform to connect all levels of all ecosystems, including internal operations, channel partners, suppliers, logistics, and global trade providers, for actual end-to-end decision-making without boundaries or functional silos.
Buyer Beware
With all the talk about control towers, it is essential to remember that they all have different capabilities. Think about the following questions to filter out the noise.
How do you access your data?
To understand what is going on at every step of your supply chain, you need to connect them all and extract sufficient data for decision-making. The classic control tower overlay method of building your connections through application programming interfaces (APIs) does not scale economically.
In networks, size is essential. Choosing an extensive network with hundreds of thousands of partners in the ecosystems is vital to your business. It is crucial to time-to-value, the total cost of ownership, and even the financial viability of most deployments.
How do you understand the data?
Applications without data are pointless. Look for an operating platform with data from all relevant sources and a full suite of planning and execution applications to power cross-functional business decisions. You can only do this with an overlay of a control tower.
Departmental control towers lead to isolated results because they must look at the big picture. Even if your first use case is only functional, an operating platform with a wide range of applications will protect your investment and give you a way to grow.
How do you get everyone in your supply chain to work together?
Collaboration has different meanings for different people. Most people think of it as internal communication between departments within a business, but that is just the beginning. In control tower use cases, connecting and talking to external partners across different levels and ecosystems is important.
Meaningful collaboration is based on personas and driven by processes. Connecting departments lets internal and external parties share their thoughts and actions across any function, tier, or channel in the supply chain. Everyone knows what is going on and has the power to make decisions and act on them right away, saving time by cutting down on interruptions and giving you the most freedom to take advantage of opportunities.
How well-tested is AI?
Field-proven AI is a core requirement for making complex, cross-functional business decisions and managing data from ecosystem partners. Ask vendors to show that their AI has been tested in the field because its reliability directly affects your business’s future.
Refrain from looking at AI used in control tower use cases in isolation. Like apps, AI does not do anything without data to feed it. Instead, it would help if you looked at how strong and good the AI is and how well the system can get the data it needs to do AI-related things.
Reach new heights of agility and resilience with control tower capabilities that run on a single operating platform and give you the data, apps, and AI you need.
About Certus Group
The Certus Group is a global solutions provider focused on growing small and medium-sized businesses. Certus simply and cost-effectively delivers the power of ERP to small companies via the cutting-edge cloud and mobile technologies.
You only need an internet connection to access the same sophisticated and expensive ERP as larger enterprises.