Supply Chain Control Tower: 12-Week Implementation

Organizations are making efforts to make their supply chain processes more resilient against shocks/disruptions. According to a report by McKinsey, demand variability, difficulty in forecasting, sourcing issues, lack of visibility of supplier risks, risk prone logistics happen to be the major drivers for supply-chain variability.

Why is Supply Chain Visibility important?

Supply Chain consists of levers which are strategic, tactical and operational in nature. Beginning with long range demand planning, network modeling, to drilling down to S&Op, Annual sales and Budget considerations, an integration of demand sensing, demand shaping and supply planning is required. In order to achieve this, visibility across all facets of Supply Chain is a necessity. In a recent interview conducted by McKinsey with the Chief Supply Chain officer of a Food manufacturing major, investing in supply chain visibility came to be the first step towards minimizing the exposure to supply chain disruptions. But currently, this is a persistent challenge in organizations.

Why is Supply Chain visibility a challenge for organizations?

1. Usually data is present in silos in ERP systems, warehouse management and order management systems, transportation management systems, with each catering to only a part of the supply chain. Consolidation of this data is needed by different users such as supply planners and leaders on a regular basis, with views catering to their specific needs and KPI monitoring. Not just them, but this data is also critical for departments such as sales and marketing to optimize processes and drive better decision making in areas of demand forecasting, distribution, promotion planning and the like.
2. Another concern that crops up with the aggregation of data from the diverse and complex supply chain systems is that of a scalable and robust architecture. Primary supply chain IT applications like SAP, Blue Yonder, 3PL Logistics or TMS Systems do not have consistent data structure and schema. Therefore, data needs to be harmonized first.

What is our solution?

Sigmoid’s Control Tower solution, built using Azure Services, in accordance to the Well Architected Framework, follows a data mesh architecture with the creation of curated data products. With the intermediary layer taking care of the data transformations, there is a decoupling of the source of data from its destination, thereby reducing dependencies and making it easier to scale without disrupting data flows.

Our solution functions as a single source of truth for the Supply Chain Functions. Consolidating and harmonizing data across multiple sources, different modules across all the Seven pillars of Supply Chain ( such as for Supply Planning, Demand Planning, Order management, Manufacturing Efficiency, Quality Controls, Logistics, Cost Control) is created, keeping the user profiles in mind, factoring in scenario management capabilities, enabling the slicing and dicing on the data with a single click. The modules provide timely access to KPIs for taking preventive actions, drilling down to the root cause of an issue rather than just firefighting on a day to day basis.

Our solution has been pivotal in solving use cases around:

1. Demand and Supply Planning
2. Manufacturing Efficiency
3. Risk Optimization.. to name a few

Key Azure workloads configured and optimized while building this solution:

1. Azure Data Factory (ADF) for orchestrating data integration pipelines to integrate data from diverse sources
2. Azure Data Lake Storage, serving as the underlying storage layer
3. Microsoft Purview for a Unified Data Governance
4. Azure Machine Learning
5. Integrating and analysing large data sets
6. Power BI for Business Intelligence