Supply chain executives have heard the pitch for years: “Implement a supply chain control tower and gain end-to-end visibility and control.” Yet after significant investments of time and money, many are left wondering why their control tower initiatives haven’t transformed operations as promised.
Since the early 2000s, major shippers began implementing supply chain control towers to bridge planning and execution. The concept was compelling — a centralized platform offering real-time visibility, proactive alerts, advanced analytics, and cross-functional collaboration.
Who wouldn’t want a system that could:
Yet despite these promises, the reality has often been disappointing. Many organizations ended up with expensive, backward-looking reporting tools disconnected from actual operations.
Most companies operate with best-of-breed solutions — separate systems for transportation, warehousing, and planning. In some cases, the siloed nature of operations is even more extreme with teams using different systems for the various processes that fall under a function like planning. McKinsey’s Supply Chain 4.0 Study revealed that 40-60% of a supply chain planner’s time is spent on transactional activities rather than value-adding strategic work.
The fundamental challenge has always been bringing these pieces together to help teams manage the relationship between each system.
I’ve seen this firsthand: it was one thing to notice a potential shortage in your WMS, but how could you use your other systems to fix it? And more importantly, how could you know before it was too late?
While companies could achieve visibility within their four walls, the real supply chain disruptions occur externally, requiring information from suppliers, carriers, and other network partners.
Attempts to connect these disparate systems created genuine data nightmares:
Even after major investments, significant gaps remained in the data. The result? Incomplete information and delayed visibility — the exact opposite of what control towers promised.
According to a survey of 250 U.S. supply chain leaders, only 2 in 10 organizations can understand 75%-100% of what’s happening in their supply chain in real time. Meanwhile, 75% of respondents need between 3-10 systems for their supply chain decision making and only 22% of shippers with more than $1 billion in revenue believe their supply chain control tower is highly effective at driving action.
In practice, many control towers devolved into manual efforts — they required more people, not less, to determine and resolve the root causes of problems. While data might be visible on a screen, coordinating responses still required dozens of calls and emails.
A Gartner survey about supply chain resilience revealed that an average disruption requires at least 34 manual system updates across 6 different platforms — and this only counts direct system updates, not including communication and coordination activities. Similarly, MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics research showed that a single disruption generates an average of 25 emails and requires input from 8 different roles.
Historically, when disruptions hit supply chain teams orchestrated these manual tasks in “war rooms” — essentially, they resorted to Excel, email, and phone calls to address issues the control tower couldn’t automatically handle.
If your team still spends hours each day chasing updates and sitting in emergency response meetings, your control tower hasn’t delivered on its core promise.
Many legacy control towers generated too many alerts without proper prioritization or context. Visibility for visibility’s sake can overwhelm operations teams.
For example, a logistics manager at a retailer doesn’t need to know that their inbound shipment of return racks is running late — they need to know that the inbound order with the items for an upcoming campaign are running late. When early control towers flagged every minor delay as an incident, it led to alert fatigue. Teams couldn’t separate noise from signal, often missing critical warnings amid the chatter.
Legacy control towers were typically custom-configured to known processes and business rules. When unusual events occurred (port closures, supplier bankruptcies, weather events), the systems were too slow to adapt.
Executives grew frustrated that despite investing in “next-gen” capabilities, their teams were still scrambling when the unexpected hit. The agility promised wasn’t delivered because the tools were only as flexible as their initial design.
These aren’t just operational headaches — they directly impact financial performance:
After a decade of underwhelming results, new, AI-powered control towers are capable of delivering on the original promise: seeing how external factors in your supply chain network impact business operations, and do something about it without having to add headcount.
FourKites’ Intelligent Control Tower accomplishes this by combining three important components:
Modern control towers unite data from across enterprise systems with broader transportation networks to create a genuine single source of truth that enables you to spot risks and opportunities.
For example, FourKites processes the activities of over 1,600 global supply chains daily alongside a connection to live operations to spot disruptions weeks before they impact business. Our platform transforms millions of data points into insights, including facility dwell patterns across more than 8 million locations, lane-specific transit intelligence, cross-customer delivery patterns, network-wide capacity insights and more.
Having a virtual models of supply chain assets — from individual shipments to entire facility operations — that continuously update helps you understand how disruptions will ripple through your network.
When problems arise, you know precisely which customers, orders, and facilities are affected, which helps you prioritize actions based on business impact, not just urgency. Rather than treating all exceptions equally, you can focus on what truly matters.
Artificial intelligence offers a new approach to supply chain orchestration that addresses the limitations of traditional systems — most importantly, by eliminating the extra headcount that previous control towers required.
Where past solutions struggled with data variety and volume, AI excels at processing large amounts of data in different formats in real time. It can also put that data in the context of business needs, making it immediately actionable without human intervention.
The key difference is that AI doesn’t just monitor, it takes action. Advanced AI systems now include specialized digital workers that automate entire workflows:
These digital workers handle entire processes, not just individual tasks. For example, when a critical order lacks shipping details, the system contacts the supplier, processes their documentation, and creates shipments automatically.
By learning from outcomes and past decisions, these AI systems get smarter over time, providing increasingly accurate predictions and better recommendations. This allows supply chain professionals to finally move from reactive to proactive management.
Unlike traditional control tower implementations that took years to show value, AI-powered solutions are delivering rapid returns. Most organizations now achieve payback periods of just 4 to 8 months, dramatically changing the investment calculation for supply chain executives.
The ROI of AI-powered control towers comes from three key value drivers:
The numbers speak for themselves. For example, one of the top-15 global food and beverage manufacturers transformed their operations with FourKites’ Intelligent Control Tower, leveraging AI-powered digital workers. They reduced detention costs by more than $500,000, decreased OTIF penalties by nearly $800,000, and improved logistics team productivity by 35%.
If your control tower implementation hasn’t delivered on its promises, you’re not alone. The technology has significantly advanced in recent years, and AI now makes possible what was previously just a vision.
Before investing further in control tower technology, ask these key questions:
The promise of supply chain control towers — end-to-end visibility, exception management, decision support, and cross-functional collaboration — remains valid. Thanks to AI, these goals are finally within reach.
Want to learn how AI can reduce your supply chain costs? Get our executive guide.
