Supply chain leadership, transparency, workforce development and collaboration through control tower implementation

Supply chains can be broad and spread over huge numbers of departments and across multiple sites and countries. Being able to have sight and scope of the performance of each area of the supply chain at any given time is key to an efficient successful functioning supply chain. This paper reviews how we implemented a control tower structure within the supply chain at Dormakaba UK. Dormakaba is a worldwide organisation manufacturing access solutions with presence in over 130 countries. Within the UK, the company employs over 500 across two main sites and eight satellite sites, with a turnover of over £85m. Understanding data flow within all areas and getting engagement with operational team members and supervisors is very important. Supervisors need to deal with operational data on a day-to-day basis, yet at the same time interact with managers and organisational goals, which makes their engagement paramount. The operational data is managed and viewed on a departmental control tower by each separate supervisor, which automatically feeds a manager and director level control tower, so that all people at all levels can view relevant performance and predicted performance against agreed key performance indicators (KPIs) in all supply chain areas. Regular meetings to review control towers invariably drive discussions on improvement ideas and projects, so an additional tool for collaboration was required. We adopted Microsoft Teams as a tool to log and review improvement ideas, task management and to chat to our teams across sites and departments. Obviously, there are always options to improve the structure and the ongoing challenge is to drive automated data across all departments at source, while always seeking to improve fast adoptive collaboration across the supply chain in order to be as proactive as possible in continuous improvement.