From Fragmented Signals to Shared Real-Time Visibility: How Grow BI Supports the Supply Chain Control Tower

Supply chains today generate more data than ever, but more data does not automatically mean better visibility.

Manufacturers, distributors, and building supply companies often have no shortage of systems. ERP platforms track orders and inventory. Commerce systems capture demand. Shipping and logistics tools record fulfillment activity. Yet decisions are still made with delayed, partial, or inconsistent information. Leaders may see symptoms — missed service levels, excess inventory, rising freight costs — without a clear, shared understanding of why they’re happening or where trends are heading.

This is the challenge that modern Supply Chain Control Towers are designed to address.

As outlined in my recently updated blog, What Is a Supply Chain Control Tower? A Beginner’s Guide,  a control tower is not necessarily a single application or dashboard. Instead, it is an operating layer formed when strategic and operational tools are applied with clear purpose, without overlap, to reduce blind spots and support better decision-making. Visibility is one of the foundational layers of that operating model.

This is where Grow BI, an Epicor Solution, plays a critical role.

Real-Time Visibility Is the Foundation of a Control Tower

Every effective control tower — operational or strategic — starts with real-time visibility. Without a shared, trusted view of what is happening across orders, inventory, fulfillment, and performance, even the best execution or planning tools are forced to operate in isolation.

The problem most organizations face isn’t a lack of reporting. It’s fragmented visibility:

• Orders, inventory, and fulfillment data spread across ERP, commerce, shipping, and external systems
• Different teams using different reports, spreadsheets, and definitions
• Metrics that don’t reconcile between operations and finance
• Trends and risks that surface only after service levels or costs are already impacted

In manufacturing, this often shows up as late recognition of production bottlenecks or inventory imbalances. In wholesale distribution, it appears as backorders, fill-rate erosion, or branch-level performance gaps. In building supply, it can mean material availability issues or delivery delays that ripple across job sites.

Grow BI is designed to address this visibility gap by turning fragmented operational data into shared insights.

What Grow BI Contributes to the Control Tower Model

Grow BI supports the Supply Chain Control Tower by providing a visibility and analytics layer that sits above operational systems. Its role is to help teams understand performance, identify trends, and align decisions across the organization.

Specifically, Grow BI provides a shared, real-time view of supply chain performance by unifying data from:

• Epicor ERP systems such as BisTrack, Prophet 21, Eclipse, or Kinetic
• Epicor Commerce
• Epicor Quick Ship
• Other eCommerce and supply chain systems

Using over 150 prebuilt connectors, organizations can bring together data that would otherwise remain siloed. When a prebuilt connector doesn’t exist, teams can create additional connectors using the Custom REST API Connector Builder, extending visibility without custom data engineering projects.

The result is not just “more data,” but consistent metrics, informative reports, and dashboards that reflect how the business actually operates — across orders, inventory, fulfillment, and performance.

From Reports to Analytics: Why This Matters

Traditional ERP reporting answers basic questions: what happened, where, and when. But supply chain leaders increasingly need to understand patterns, relationships, and trends across systems and over time.

Grow BI enables this shift from reporting to analytics by:

• Enabling users to analyze data visually, by interacting with charts and dashboards that summarize large volumes of data and highlight trends, outliers, and performance gaps
• Centralizing operational data into a governed analytics environment
• Providing reusable datasets and shared metric definitions
• Allowing users to set up their own datasets and metrics without writing SQL queries or scripts, although those options remain available for technical staff

This distinction matters. When teams rely on spreadsheets or static reports, insight is slow, fragile, and difficult to scale. When analytics are embedded into daily decision-making, visibility becomes proactive rather than reactive.

Designed for Citizen Analysts, Not Just Specialists

One of the most important ways Grow BI supports the control tower concept is who it’s built for.

Many BI initiatives stall because analytics remain confined to IT, data engineers, or a small group of analysts. Business users wait weeks — or even months — for new dashboards, only to discover the questions have already changed.

Grow BI is intentionally designed for citizen analysts: operations, supply chain, finance, and sales leaders who need to explore data and answer questions without relying on technical specialists.

With no-code data ingestion, modeling, and visualization, Grow BI puts analytics directly into the hands of the people closest to the work. In practice, this has translated into average onboarding times of around 45 days, compared to six months or more with traditional BI platforms.

For organizations building a control tower operating layer, this matters. Visibility cannot be centralized if insight creation remains bottlenecked.

Scaling Visibility Across the Organization

Visibility only creates value when it scales.

Grow BI supports this by enabling:

• Unlimited users, removing licensing barriers that limit adoption
• Shared datasets and metrics that ensure consistency across teams
• Dashboards tailored to different roles, from executives to branch, warehouse, or yard managers

This allows operations and finance to work from the same numbers. It enables leaders to move beyond anecdotal explanations and align decisions around data-driven insight.

In distribution environments, this might mean consistent visibility into fill rates, backorders, inventory turns, and branch performance. In manufacturing, it could mean aligning production, inventory, and financial performance metrics. In building supply, it often centers on material availability, delivery performance, and service levels tied to job-site demand.

To make this concrete, Grow BI includes out-of-the-box dashboards and metrics tailored to common Epicor use cases. These dashboards provide immediate visibility into areas such as inventory performance, fulfillment reliability, service levels, and operational trends, without requiring custom development.

You can explore example Grow BI dashboards here to see how these metrics are presented across different Epicor environments and roles.

Supporting Both Operational and Strategic Control Towers

Grow BI supports both Operational and Strategic Supply Chain Control Towers by delivering shared real-time visibility and analytics.

• At the operational level, Grow BI helps teams monitor day-to-day performance, identify emerging issues, and understand where attention is needed.
• At the strategic level, it provides the historical context and trend analysis necessary to evaluate performance over time, support planning discussions, and inform investment decisions.

Within the Supply Chain Control Tower operating layer, Grow BI focuses on visibility and analytics — making performance clear, comparable, and shared across teams — while execution, automation, and system-level actions are handled by other applications.

A Real-World Example: Accu

Accu, an Epicor customer, is a fabricated metals distributor serving 125+ countries with custom manufacturing capabilities and a high-SKU supply chain. This case study illustrates the role shared visibility plays in enabling growth across complex operations.

By using Grow BI to expand access to operational data and analytics, Accu enabled teams across the business to engage with data more effectively.

As Beckie Pisacane, Head of Merchandising & Intelligence at Accu, puts it, “At first, I was grabbing data from SQL and putting it into Excel or Google Sheets and pivoting. We evaluated providers such as Power BI and Google Data Studio,” she shares. “Grow stood out because visually the metrics are very understandable. It's easy for managers who don't have any analytics experience to build and consume reports. Other software requires an element of database knowledge, and programs such as Tableau and Python demand a coding language.”

That access wasn’t about replacing operational systems. It was about empowering teams with insight while reducing reliance on spreadsheets, accelerating analysis, and supporting better decisions as the business scaled.

Visibility Is Not Optional Anymore

What Is a Supply Chain Control Tower? A Beginner’s Guide makes an important point: modern supply chains struggle not because they lack systems, but because those systems are applied in isolation. A Supply Chain Control Tower helps bridge those boundaries.

Grow BI plays a foundational role in that model by delivering the visibility layer: the shared understanding of performance that enables coordination, alignment, and informed action.

For manufacturers, distributors, and building supply companies navigating volatile demand, constrained labor, and rising costs, visibility is no longer optional. It is the prerequisite for every other control tower capability.

Where Grow BI Fits — and Why It Matters

Grow BI is not a control tower by itself. It does not replace ERP, planning, or execution tools. Instead, it supports the Supply Chain Control Tower operating layer by:

• Unifying fragmented operational data
• Enabling self-service analytics for citizen analysts
• Scaling trusted metrics across the organization
• Reducing reliance on spreadsheets and manual reporting

In doing so, Grow BI helps organizations move from fragmented signals to shared visibility, shifting from reactive decision-making to informed, coordinated action.

Learn more about how Grow BI can make a difference for your business.