SCT’s advisors believe strongly in the promise of Control Tower capabilities. We have embraced supply chain software provider investments in this space but recognize a successful ecosystem requires critical collaborations between these vendors, internal IT teams, integrators and marketplaces, and cloud platforms. Our objective is to help customers leverage their existing assets and embrace new offerings if appropriate with a clear end state in mind for their supply chain architecture.
Our Approach
Interviews with key stakeholders are coupled with SCT-led education on the current landscape of cloud computing platforms, supply chain vendors, and AI services providers, with a focus on your critical business needs and near-term opportunities for improvement. Aligning key objectives for the project across production planning, inventory deployment, order promising, merchandising, and business analytics allows us to build consensus and shared vision across the organization for Control Tower project success.
With stakeholder alignment and a shared vision in place, evaluation of impacts to existing system architectures will identify areas of opportunity for a holistic data ecosystem as well as cloud platforms. We assess integration methods, reporting platforms, and feeder application capabilities to design an ideal future-state architecture. This serves as a foundation for defining use cases and guiding informed decisions on whether to build, buy, or partner for key capabilities.
Detailed interviews around pain points and opportunities in each area of the business and for each user role allows SCT to align current state capabilities with the art of what’s possible in Control Tower visibility and augmented decision making (or even automated) capabilities. We will work with our clients to identify a prioritized list of critical capabilities needed from a Control Tower platform, as well as additional capabilities and considerations for the functionality to be developed within it, along with any near-term improvements that can be achieved prior to a more formal project.
Vendor demonstrations are a key step in evaluating potential partners and aligning the organization on success criteria and vendor preferences—providing essential input for the overall success of the program. SCT provides vendors with guidance on your organizational priorities and what we see as critical differentiators so you can get a 360-degree view of the options before you. Briefing sessions following the demonstrations translate vendor claims into valid expectations, and roundtable discussions unveil any reservations from the team that can be addressed in future conversations with the vendors.
Following vendor demonstrations, as the preferred solution is materializing, Scoping Workshops allow our customers to dig deeper into capabilities, use cases, and setup requirements to more fully develop understand solution design and the effort required to deliver it. SCT facilitates internal and external workshops inclusive of vendor resources to walk through the priority use cases and how they will be delivered through data integrations, configuration, and/or custom development.
Scoping workshops produce phased implementation plans with defined scope assumptions, resource needs, timelines, and clear expectations for activities and deliverables at each stage. Longer-term roadmaps outline deferred functionality to clarify what’s in and out of scope, helping the organization consider future design implications early on.
