Supply Chain Control Towers in Action | APQC Webinar

Supply chain control towers are emerging as the practical way to turn fragmented, multi-company supply networks into coordinated decision-making—by unifying data, standardizing processes, and assigning clear ownership for exceptions. Across three very different organizations, the common thread is that “visibility” alone doesn’t fix supply problems. The real payoff comes when alerts and events are prioritized by business impact, planners can collaborate across functions and regions, and governance makes decisions repeatable rather than reactive.

Exxon Mobil’s lubricants business built an end-to-end control tower to address pain points created by disconnected regional systems and manual, firefighting-style planning. With ERP and planning tools running separately in Asia Pacific, the Americas, and Europe Middle East and Africa, the company chose a global rollout early to ensure one set of procedures and a single operating model. More than 250 pain points were collected through workshops, then consolidated into themes: limited cross-region visibility, coordination challenges, heavy manual/reactive processes, data governance gaps, and pressure to improve service levels while lowering costs. The resulting objective was a cloud-based “single source of truth” that orchestrates data, people, and processes across the lubricants value chain—from raw material suppliers through production, packaging, distribution, and delivery to customers.

The project was structured as a five-year program executed with agile methods, releasing capabilities as they became ready. Change management was treated as a core requirement, including robust adoption planning (using Prosci change management). Early deliverables focused on data visibility and supplier connectivity (via API connections into data lakes), along with exception management that groups alerts into events, assigns ownership, and supports root-cause collaboration. Later capabilities added scenario planning—built into the same control tower environment—so planners could run “what-if” simulations quickly (for example, modeling demand increases and impacts on raw materials and production capacity). Exxon Mobil framed the effort as a marathon: a staged build that kept funding alive by demonstrating measurable inventory and service improvements.

The reproductive health supply chain network (van), hosted by the Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition, approached control tower value from a public-health resilience angle. The network’s visibility platform enabled real-world redistribution during disruptions such as Cyclone Idai, where delays in Mozambique threatened stockouts across thousands of kilometers. The van’s scale—nearly 100 member organizations, including 35 governments—supports tracking thousands of shipments and orders across hundreds of products and countries. Its impact was quantified through decisions that expedited shipments and transfers, mobilized additional funding after geopolitical shocks, and helped prevent stockouts during the pandemic.

Lessons learned from van emphasized that a control tower is a multi-enterprise network requiring governance, data harmonization, and decision-making capacity—not just dashboards. Stu Strummel highlighted the need for “drum beat” alignment (harmonizing the cadence of data readiness with planning cycles) and warned that data must be actionable when it arrives. Abbott’s story reinforced a more pragmatic approach: starting from a manual “war room” during performance issues, then digitizing and standardizing KPI reporting using Power BI and Microsoft tools, linking control tower outputs to S&OP rhythms, escalation processes, and risk monitoring. Across all three, success depended on people-first operating models, ongoing master data management, and process integration that makes exceptions manageable and decisions faster.