EnterpriseSCM for Manufacturers · AI control tower
For manufacturers that move finished goods through plants, RDCs, C&F agents and distributors across India. Indent to placement, gate to load, transit to temperature, RDC stock to expiry, claims to carrier scorecards — on one record, with a digital twin that tests next week’s disruption before it happens.
WhySound familiar?
From supply-chain and logistics heads at manufacturers. Composite quotes from discovery calls — the problems are real; the names are left out.
“The RDC calls before the tracker does.”
We learn a truck is late when the depot phones. By then the shelf is already empty.
Head of logisticsStock-outs found by the customer
“Short-dated stock turns up at audit.”
One RDC sits on batches near expiry while another orders fresh from the plant.
Supply-chain plannerWrite-offs nobody saw coming
“Every review is an argument about numbers.”
Transport says OTIF is 96. Sales says 81. Same month, different spreadsheets.
VP supply chainHours lost before the real discussion
HowWhat changes with the control tower
Product screens with illustrative data. In your walkthrough we load your own lanes, plants, outlets or SKUs.
01Hearing it from the RDC
You call the RDC — not the other way round
02Surprise write-offs
Short-dated stock moved, not written off
03Arguing over OTIF
Reviews start with the decision
FieldSCM for Manufacturers in the field
The workplace it runs in, the person who uses it on a phone, the team at the desk and the detail it reads.
Photographs are illustrative — real customer sites are not shown.
LiveIn production today
The control tower is built on a module that is live in production: the gate, the docks, the road, the delivery and the carrier scorecard on one record. These are its screens, with illustrative data.
LiveInside the plant
The supervisor’s handheld stamps every hop. The gap between two stamps is the dwell that analytics turns into a bottleneck — by plant, by shift, by hour.
Operation typesLoadingUnloadingCustomer pickupExportEach with its own dwell norms.
LiveOn the road
TAT, ETA, ATA and visibility are calculated the same way for every trip, in calendar days, from data the customer can inspect. When a carrier disputes a delay months later, the trip replays with its sources.
TAT
Arrival against the promised date, in whole calendar days. Still on the road? Arrival is projected from pending km.
ETA
With no pings it assumes 250 km/day. Once pings arrive it uses the speed this truck has actually managed since billing.
ATA
Did the trip actually finish within seven days of the promised date? No projection at all — the number that survives a customer audit.
Visibility
A trip is Super Tracked only if it has a valid ping on every calendar day from billing to unloading — SIM, FASTag, GPS, API or manual.
LiveAccountability
A delayed trip must be attributed — shipper, customer or carrier — with a reason. Those attributions feed one 0–100 score per carrier, the leaderboard that business allocation and quarterly reviews run on.
Delay owners: shipper, customer or carrier — a type without a reason still counts as pending.
LiveSustainability
Each leg is weight × distance × the factor for that vehicle’s own class and fuel, on the ISO 14083 / GLEC tonne-kilometre method. A missing weight is flagged, never guessed — so the figure survives an ESG audit.
Part-loads are credited too: the report shows the saving against an all-full-truck baseline, by carrier, plant and lane.
LiveData in
Nothing here asks the carrier to change how they work. Their files, toll reads and phones are read as they are — and every conflict with what is already recorded waits for a person.
The daily sheet seeds every trip, promise date and route distance; parsed and validated before anything is written.
Carrier and warehouse files in any template, staged first. The LR series decides the carrier; headers only break a tie.
Toll-plaza reads and consent-based SIM location — rate-limited, retried from the log, cost tracked per trip.
Vehicle trackers and carrier visibility platforms, filtered to the trip window so a reused truck never pollutes the map.
The supervisor stamps every hop with photos, the loading sheet and a safety checklist.
Proof of delivery chased only once it is due; gate invoices reconciled against dispatch billing both ways.
LiveOne portal
Role decides both the pages someone sees and the rows that come back from every query — enforced on the server, so a carrier can never see another carrier’s trucks.
Gate supervisor
Vehicles grouped by dock, one tap per hop, photos and checklist — and a shift report at handover.
Plant & yard team
Every vehicle inside the plant and the free dock for the next one.
Logistics head
Bottleneck funnel, congestion heatmap, delays by owner, the carrier leaderboard and CO₂e.
Carrier
Status updates, PODs and their own score — scoped on the server, never just hidden in the UI.
Customer
A read-only journey for one shipment, without a login or a spreadsheet.
01Open the control tower
Click through it. Trucks replay across the network, a reefer crosses its temperature band, short-dated stock piles up at an RDC, a truck gets re-packed, and a monsoon week runs through the twin.
Illustrative network and figures — not customer data. In your briefing, these are your plants, lanes and RDCs.
02Indent to shelf
Batch is the universal key. Every hand-off — plant, carrier, gate, RDC, distributor — reads and writes the same record, so a claim, a temperature excursion and a late truck are the same story.
Indenting & SLA
RDC indents arrive from the ERP; each carrier has an acceptance window and a placement clock.
Holding yard
The carrier must report at the yard within 12 hours of accepting — tracked, not trusted.
ANPR · RFID
Eight gate events per truck, from gate-in to gate-out, so turnaround is measured to the minute.
Deck packing
The optimiser packs by weight, height and crush rules and sequences drops from the door.
ETA · live temperature
Telematics and loggers feed the ETA model and the cold-chain band on every reefer.
Arrival notice
The RDC hears what is coming, when, and in which condition — before the truck is at the dock.
C&F inventory · FEFO
Batch-level stock at every RDC, shipped by expiry, with near-expiry stock moved early.
Distributor delivery
Secondary distribution tracked to the distributor, with proof on delivery.
Damage · vision proof
Photo evidence classified by vision models; claims raised against the right carrier.
Hisab · scorecards
Driver hisab closed in days, and every carrier scored on placement, OTIF and damage.
03Reference architecture
Built on what you already run — ERP, WMS, DMS, telematics, gate cameras — through an event bus and change-data capture into a governed lakehouse, with the intelligence layer on top.
04KPI dictionary
Every KPI has one definition and one target, written down, and computed the same way for the company, the 3PL and the vendor.
| KPI | Definition | Target |
|---|---|---|
| OTIF | Units delivered within lane standard +10% and zero damage ÷ units dispatched | ≥ 95% |
| Placement SLA | Carrier reported at the holding yard ≤ 12 h of indent acceptance | ≥ 95% |
| Gate TAT | ANPR gate-in → gate-out, 8 events | ≤ 2 h 30 m |
| Load factor | Units loaded ÷ carrier capacity, weighted by trips | ≥ 93% |
| Empty running | Empty km ÷ total km | ≤ 40% |
| Damage rate | Units with transit damage ÷ units delivered | ≤ 0.25% |
| Checklist first-pass | Checklists cleared by AI without re-submission | ≥ 97% |
| Hisab close time | Submission → payment | ≤ 2 days |
| Ticket SLA | Resolved within priority SLA | ≥ 95% |
| kg CO₂e / pallet | ISO 14083, fuel-based, well-to-wheel | −8% YoY |
05Five control rooms
From the logistics head’s command center to the driver’s hisab — role-scoped for the company, 3PLs, vendors, RDCs and drivers.
06Rollout
Phased so each step pays for the next — starting where the data is richest: the owned fleet and the gate.
Telematics and the driver app on the owned fleet; gate ANPR; the data lake.
Control tower, ETA model, tickets, hisab, attendance, RDC intimation.
Route and load optimiser, vendor portal and scorecards, safety vision, carbon.
Digital twin, geo-analytics, allocation agent, alternate-fuel and rail-road pilots.
Company, 3PL, vendor, RDC and driver each see only their own slice.
Driving licences and IDs held apart, masked everywhere else.
Every event, edit and decision with who and when.
REST and event contracts, ISO 8601 in IST, batch as the universal key.
FAQQuestions we get about SCM for Manufacturers
SCM for Manufacturers is an AI control tower from plant gate to shelf: placement SLA, gate TAT, load plans, cold chain, FEFO and a network twin — one ranked list of exceptions, and ten KPIs with one definition each. Short, factual answers for buyers, procurement and the assistants people ask first.
In short. SCM for Manufacturers is an AI control tower from plant gate to shelf: placement SLA, gate TAT, load plans, cold chain, FEFO and a network twin — one ranked list of exceptions, and ten KPIs with one definition each. It is built for supply-chain and logistics heads at manufacturers. It exists to remove the problems those teams describe in almost every first conversation: stock-outs discovered by the customer; write-offs from short-dated stock nobody saw; and hours spent arguing whose OTIF is right. With SCM for Manufacturers, teams get every truck, reefer and exception on one screen, ranked, first-expiry first-out across every RDC, and the same KPI for the company, the 3PL and the carrier. It connects to ERP / WMS feeds, Carrier GPS & reefer telemetry, Network twin and KPI definitions, is used by Supply chain · logistics · 3PL, and runs on web. Like every Autowhat AI product, SCM for Manufacturers goes live on one site, lane or process first, usually within weeks, on managed cloud, in your own VPC or on-premises, and shares one operational record with the other products, so the second deployment reuses the data and integrations of the first.
Supply-chain and logistics heads at manufacturers. An AI control tower from plant gate to shelf: placement SLA, gate TAT, load plans, cold chain, FEFO and a network twin — one ranked list of exceptions, and ten KPIs with one definition each.
stock-outs discovered by the customer; write-offs from short-dated stock nobody saw; hours spent arguing whose OTIF is right.
every truck, reefer and exception on one screen, ranked; first-expiry first-out across every RDC; the same KPI for the company, the 3PL and the carrier.
It connects to ERP / WMS feeds, Carrier GPS & reefer telemetry, Network twin, KPI definitions. Users: Supply chain · logistics · 3PL. Channel: Web.
With a 30-minute working session on your own data — an engineer from the relevant sector, not a sales queue. The first wave is scoped in that call; most products go live on one site, lane or process within weeks and then scale.
On managed cloud, in your own VPC (AWS, Azure or GCP) or on-premises, with your keys. SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 controls, India data residency when required, and local or open-weight models when policy demands it. The data stays yours.
07Briefing
A working session with the engineers who build it: your plants, RDCs and lanes on the map, your KPIs defined, and the first disruption run through the twin.
