Presented by Celonis
When tariff rates change overnight, companies have 48 hours to design alternatives and take action before competitors provide the best options. On Celosphere 2025 in Munich, companies showed how they turn this chaos into competitive advantage – achieving real results that separate the winners from the losers.
International Vinmar: A global plastics and chemicals distributor created a real-time digital twin of its $3 billion supply chain, reducing lag times by more than 20% and improving supply agility across global operations.
Florida Crystals: The company, one of America’s largest cane sugar producers, freed up millions of dollars in working capital and strengthened supply chain resiliency by eliminating manual rework in finance, procurement and inbound deliveries. AI pilot programs now include invoice processing, predictive maintenance and order management.
ASOS: The e-commerce fashion giant has connected its end-to-end supply chain to provide full transparency, reduce process variability, accelerate product time to market and improve customer experience at scale.
The common thread: process intelligence that fills the gap that time-honored ERP systems cannot close – connecting operational points in ERP, financial and logistics systems when seconds count.
“It’s not a question of whether there will be disruption,” says Peter Budweiser, CEO of supply chain at Celonis. “It’s about whether your systems can show what’s broken quickly enough to fix it.”
This visibility gap costs the average company double-digit millions in working capital and competitive positioning. How 54% of supply chain leaders face disruptions every daythe pressure shifts to AI agents who perform real actions: triggering purchase orders, redirecting shipments, adjusting inventory. However, an autonomous agent operating on obsolete or isolated data can make millions of dollars in errors when pricing structures change overnight.
Tariffs, as elderly as trade itself, have become the ultimate stress test for enterprise AI – revealing whether companies truly understand their supply chains and whether their AI can be trusted to work.
Up-to-date ERP: prosperous in data, penniless insight
Supply chain leaders face a paradox: drowning in data, starving for knowledge. Established enterprise systems – SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft – record every transaction in detail.
SAP records the purchase order. Oracle is tracking your shipment. The warehouse system records inventory movements. Each serves its purpose, but when tariffs change and companies need to model alternative supply scenarios across all three simultaneously, data accumulates in silos.
“The speed of the disruption cascade has changed,” says Manik Sharma, director of GTM supply chain artificial intelligence at Celonis. “Traditional ERP systems were not built with today’s volatility in mind.”
Companies generate thousands of reports showing what happened in the last quarter. It is tough for them to answer the question of what will happen if tomorrow the tariffs augment by 25% and it is necessary to change the supplier within a few days.
Fares: 48-hour fight
Global trade volatility has transformed tariffs from a predictable cost into a strategic weapon. As novel rates drop with unprecedented frequency, manufacturing costs at suppliers skyrocket, finance teams struggle to calculate the impact on margins, and procurement scrambles to find alternatives hidden in disconnected systems where no one knows whether switching suppliers delays deliveries or violates contracts.
By the 48th hour, competitors who have already modeled the scenarios switch suppliers, while delayed movers face capacity constraints and higher prices.
Process intelligence changes this lively by enabling companies to continuously model what-if scenarios, showing leaders how tariff changes cascade through suppliers, contracts, production lines, warehouses and customers. Once rates level out, companies will be able to change course within hours, not days.
No AI without PI: Why process intelligence is non-negotiable in supply chains
AI and supply chains are interdependent: AI needs operational context, and supply chains need AI to keep pace with variability. 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. It is estimated that 85-90% of SAP customers are still migrating from ECC to S/4HANA. Moving to newer databases doesn’t solve the supply chain visibility problem – it provides faster access to the same fragmented data.
Kerry Brown, transformation evangelist at Celonis, sees this across industries.
“Organizations are moving from PeopleSoft to Oracle or EBS to Fusion. Most solutions are in SAP,” he explains. “But they don’t really need a new ERP system. They need to understand how things actually work in the systems they already have.”
This requires a comprehensive operational context. Process intelligence delivers this by enabling companies to extract and combine event data across systems, showing how processes are performing in real time.
This distinction becomes critical when implementing autonomous agents. When visibility is fragmented, autonomous agents can easily make decisions that seem rational locally but cause disruption downstream. With real-time context, AI can operate transparently and precisely, and supply chains can stay ahead of tariff disruptions.
Digital twins: the power of real-time response
All companies featured on Celosphere applied the same principle: they understand how processes run in real-time systems. Celonis PI creates a digital twin of existing systems, using Process Intelligence Graph to comprehensively connect orders, shipments, invoices and payments. Dependencies that time-honored integrations lack become evident. A delay at SAP immediately reveals its impact on Oracle, warehouse scheduling, and customer delivery obligations.
“The platform brings together process data across systems and departments, enriched with business context that enables AI agents to effectively transform operations,” says Daniel Brown, chief product officer at Celonis.
With this cross-system awareness, Celonis coordinates activities across complicated workflows involving AI agents, humans and automation – which is especially crucial when tariffs force rapid decisions on suppliers, shipments and customers.
Zero-copy integration enables instant modeling
Key Achievement Presented at Celosphere – integration without copying with Databricks — removes another barrier. Traditionally, analyzing supply chain data meant copying from source systems to central warehouses, which caused delays in data transfer.
Celonis Data Core now integrates directly with platforms such as Databricks i Microsoft fabricquerying billions of records in near real time, without duplication. When trade policy changes, companies model alternatives immediately, not after nightly data refresh cycles.
Enhanced Task Mining extends this by linking computer activity – keystrokes, mouse clicks, screen scrolling – with business processes. This exposes the manual work hidden to system logs: the spreadsheet gymnastics, email negotiations, phone calls that keep supply chains moving during urgent changes.
Competitive advantage in volatile markets
Most companies can’t rip out and replace the systems that support critical operations – nor should they. Process intelligence offers a different path: build workflows on top of existing systems, deploy AI where it creates value, and continually adapt to changing conditions. This “Free the Process” movement frees companies from inflexible architectures without forcing wholesale replacement.
As global trade becomes more volatile, modeling companies will move faster, make smarter decisions, and turn tariff chaos into competitive advantage – all while keeping existing ERP systems running.
When the next wave of tariffs comes – and it will – companies will not have days to react. They will have hours. The question isn’t whether your ERP captures data. What matters is whether your systems connect the dots swift enough.
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