A supply chain control tower is one screen on which a large shipper sees every one of its shipments at once, with the ones that are likely to be late flagged at the top. It is usually a part of supply chain visibility software. The name comes from an airport's control tower, from which every aircraft can be watched.
A large consumer goods company may send 500 or more trucks a day from its factories to its warehouses and distributors. No team can watch 500 dots on a map. So the control tower does two jobs. First, it compares each shipment with its plan: where the truck should be by now and when it should arrive. Second, it lists only the exceptions, the shipments that are off their plan, with the most serious first. This is a use of anomaly detection: the software learns what a normal trip looks like on each route, and flags the trips that depart from it.
Say a biscuit maker in Gurugram has 620 trucks on the road one Wednesday. At 11 a.m., the control tower shows 612 of them on time, and eight flagged. One truck bound for a distributor in Jaipur has not moved for three hours on the highway near Shahjahanpur, in Rajasthan. On this route, trucks normally stop for 45 minutes at most. So the software moves the truck's predicted arrival from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m., after the distributor's warehouse closes. The distributor has a festival offer starting the next morning. An employee in the logistics team calls the transport company and learns that the truck has a broken axle. She asks the company to send a second truck to take over the load, and tells the distributor about the delay. The second truck reaches Jaipur at 7 a.m. the next day, before the offer opens.
The same screen shows patterns over weeks: which transport companies are often late, which warehouses keep trucks waiting, and which routes are slow at certain hours. The logistics team uses these patterns when it chooses carriers for the next contract, through freight procurement.
A control tower is only as good as its data. If a truck sends no location, the control tower cannot watch it. So it depends on telematics devices in the trucks, or on tracking of the drivers' phones. The same kind of screen is used for ships and containers in ocean freight, where a delay is counted in days rather than hours.