For the second time this year, I have seen a supply chain control tower solution I really, really like. The latest occasion was at LLamasoft's LLamaCon user conference last week in Chicago. LLamasoft is a leading provider of supply chain design and demand management solutions.

Currently they are not calling the solution a control tower, they are struggling to come up with a name for the solution that they like. They view the term control tower as implying a solution that provides alerts on real time and near-term problems. This is a much more holistic solution. The solution sucks in a company's demand and supply plans and projects forward to find future time periods, when based on current events, it will be difficult to meet customer demand. I am going to call it a control tower because that is what it looks like to me (if interested, see the article What is a Supply Chain Control Tower for my view on this). The LLamasoft control tower allows a planner to drill down and see what the problem is and work on plan remediation.