Tariff turbulence exposes costly blind spots in supply chains and AI
Presented by Celonis
When rates change overnight, companies have 48 hours to model alternatives and act before competitors secure the best options. Bee Celosphere 2025 in Munich, companies showed how they turn that chaos into competitive advantage – with measurable results that separate winners from losers.
Vinmar InternationalThe global plastics and chemicals distributor created a $3 billion real-time digital twin of its supply chain, reducing defaults by more than 20% and improving supply flexibility across global operations.
Florida Crystals: The company, one of America’s largest cane sugar producers, has freed up millions in working capital and strengthened supply chain resilience by eliminating manual rework in finance, purchasing and inbound deliveries. AI pilots are now extending the gains to invoice processing, predictive maintenance and order management.
ASOS: The e-commerce fashion giant connected its end-to-end supply chain for complete transparency, reducing process variation, accelerating speed to market and improving the customer experience at scale.
The common thread here: process intelligence that bridges the gap that traditional ERP systems cannot close – connecting operational dots across ERP, financial and logistics systems when seconds matter.
“The question is not whether there will be disruptions,” says Peter Budweiser, General Manager Supply Chain at Celonis. “It’s about whether your systems can show you what’s broken quickly enough to fix it.”
This visibility gap costs the average company double-digit millions in working capital and competitive position. If 54% of supply chain leaders face disruptions every daythe pressure shifts to AI agents that perform real actions: trigger purchase orders, reroute shipments, adjust inventory. But an autonomous agent trading on outdated or siled data could make million-dollar mistakes if pricing structures change overnight.
Tariffs, as old as commerce itself, have become the ultimate stress test for business AI – revealing whether companies truly understand their supply chains and whether their AI can be trusted to trade.
Modern ERP: lots of data, little insight
Supply chain leaders face a paradox: they are drowning in data while starving for insight. Traditional business systems – SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft – meticulously record every transaction.
SAP registers the purchase order. Oracle is tracking the shipment. The warehouse system records stock movements. Each performs its function, but when rates change and companies need to model alternative purchasing scenarios for all three scenarios simultaneously, the data is in silos.
“What has changed is the speed at which disruptions occur,” said Manik Sharma, head of Supply Chain GTM AI at Celonis. “Traditional ERP systems are not built for today’s volatility.”
Companies generate thousands of reports showing what happened last quarter. They have difficulty answering the question of what happens if rates rise by 25% tomorrow and have to switch suppliers within a few days.
Rates: The 48-hour battle
The volatility of global trade has turned tariffs from predictable costs into strategic weapons. When new tariffs drop with unprecedented frequency, input costs at suppliers rise, finance teams race to calculate margin impact, and procurement races to find alternatives hidden in disconnected systems where no one knows if switching suppliers will delay shipments or violate contracts.
By hour 48, competitors who have already modeled scenarios execute a supplier switch, while late movers face capacity constraints and premium pricing.
Process intelligence changes that dynamic by allowing companies to continuously model “what-if” scenarios and show leaders how rate changes flow through suppliers, contracts, production lines, warehouses and customers. When interest rates fall, companies can move in hours instead of days.
No AI without PI: why process intelligence is non-negotiable for supply chains
AI and supply chains are interdependent: AI needs an operational context, and supply chains need AI to keep pace with volatility. But here’s the truth: there is no AI without PI. Without process intelligence, AI agents operate blindly.
The ongoing SAP migration wave illustrates why. An estimated 85-90% of SAP customers are still moving from ECC to S/4HANA. Moving to newer databases does not solve supply chain visibility; it provides faster access to the same fragmented data.
Kerry Brown, a transformation evangelist at Celonis, sees this across industries.
“Organizations are shifting from PeopleSoft to Oracle, or EBS to Fusion. Most of it is in SAP,” she explains. “But what they really need is not a new ERP. They need to understand how work actually flows between the systems they already have.”
That requires an end-to-end operational context. Process intelligence achieves this by allowing companies to extract and connect event data from different systems, showing how processes are executed in real time.
This distinction becomes crucial when deploying autonomous agents. When visibility is fragmented, autonomous agents can easily make decisions that appear rational locally but cause disruption downstream. With real-time context, AI can operate with clarity and precision, and supply chains can stay ahead of tariff-driven disruptions.
Digital Twins: Enabling real-time response
The companies highlighted at Celosphere all applied the same principle: understand how processes flow through systems in real time. Celonis PI creates a digital twin over existing systems and uses the Process Intelligence Graph to connect orders, shipments, invoices and payments end-to-end. Dependencies that traditional integrations miss become visible. A delay in SAP immediately reveals its impact on Oracle, warehouse planning and delivery obligations to customers.
“The platform brings together process data spanning systems and departments, enriched with business context that enables AI agents to effectively transform their operations,” said Daniel Brown, Chief Product Officer at Celonis.
With this cross-system awareness, Celonis coordinates actions across complex workflows involving AI agents, humans and automations – especially critical when tariffs force quick decisions about suppliers, shipments and customers.
Zero-copy integration enables direct modeling
A Major Advance Revealed on Celosphere – zero-copy integration with Databricks – removes another barrier. Traditionally, analyzing supply chain data meant copying from source systems to central warehouses, creating data latency.
Celonis Data Core now integrates directly with platforms such as Databricks and Microsoft fabricquerying billions of records in near real time without duplication. When trade policies change, companies model alternatives immediately, not after nightly data refresh cycles.
Enhanced Task Mining extends this by connecting desktop activity (keystrokes, mouse clicks, screen scrolls) to business processes. This exposes manual work invisible to system logs: spreadsheet gymnastics, email negotiations, phone calls that keep supply chains moving during urgent changes.
Competitive advantage in volatile markets
Most companies cannot remove and replace systems that run critical operations, nor should they. Process intelligence offers another path: build workflows based on existing systems, deploy AI where it creates value, and continuously adapt as conditions change. This ‘Free the Process’ movement frees companies from rigid architectures without forcing large-scale replacement.
As volatility in global trade increases, the model companies will move faster, make smarter decisions and turn tariff chaos into competitive advantage – all while keeping existing ERPs running.
When the next wave of tariffs hits — and it will — companies won’t have days to respond. They will have hours. The question is not whether your ERP captures the data. What matters is whether your systems connect the dots fast enough to matter.
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