Presented by Celonis
When tariff rates change overnight, companies have 48 hours to model options and take action before competitors secure the best option. At Cellosphere 2025 in Munich, enterprises demonstrated how they are turning that chaos into competitive advantage – with quantifiable results that separate the winners from the losers.
Vinmar International: Global plastics and chemicals distributor created a real-time digital twin of its $3B supply chain, reducing default speed by more than 20% and improving distribution agility across global operations.
Florida Crystal: One of the largest cane sugar producers in the U.S., the company unlocked millions in working capital and strengthened supply chain resiliency by eliminating manual rework in finance, purchasing and inbound supply. AI pilots are now driving benefits in invoice processing, predictive maintenance and order management.
Asos: The ecommerce fashion giant connected its end-to-end supply chain for full transparency, reducing process variation, accelerating speed-to-market, and improving customer experience at scale.
The common thread here: process intelligence that bridges the gap that traditional ERP systems can’t close – connecting operational points across ERP, finance and logistics systems when seconds matter.
“The question is not whether there will be disruption,” says Peter Budweiser, general manager of supply chain at Celonis. “What’s important is whether your system can show you what’s breaking fast enough to fix it.”
That visibility gap causes the average company to lose double-digit millions in working capital and competitive standing. As 54% of supply chain leaders face disruption daily, the pressure is shifting to AI agents that execute real tasks: triggering purchase orders, reordering shipments, adjusting inventory. But when tariff structures change overnight, an autonomous agent working on old or secret data could make millions of dollars in mistakes.
Tariffs, as old as trade, 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 act.
Modern ERP: data rich, insight poor
Supply chain leaders face a paradox: drowning in data while remaining hungry for insight. Traditional enterprise systems – SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft – meticulously capture every transaction.
Logs SAP purchase orders. Oracle tracks the shipment. The warehouse system records inventory movements. Each performs its function, but when tariffs change and companies need to model alternative sourcing scenarios across all three simultaneously, the data sits in silos.
“What has changed is the speed at which disruption moves,” says Manik Sharma, head of supply chain GTM AI at Celonis. “Traditional ERP systems were not built for today’s volatility.”
Companies generate thousands of reports that show what happened in the last quarter. They have difficulty answering what would happen if tomorrow tariffs increased by 25% and there was a need to change suppliers within a few days.
Tariff: 48-hour tussle
Global trade instability has transformed tariffs from perceived costs to strategic weapons. As new rates drop with unprecedented frequency, input costs soar between suppliers, finance teams struggle to calculate margin impact, and procurement races to identify alternatives hidden in disconnected systems where no one knows if switching suppliers will delay shipments or breach contracts.
By hour 48, competitors who have already prepared the scenario execute the supplier switch, while latecomers face capacity constraints and premium pricing.
Process intelligence changes that dynamic by allowing businesses to continuously model “what-if” scenarios, giving leaders insight into how tariffs change through suppliers, contracts, production lines, warehouses, and customers. When rates are hit, companies can move within hours rather than days.
No AI without PI: Why process intelligence for supply chains is non-negotiable
AI and supply chains are interdependent: AI needs operational context, and supply chains need AI to keep pace with volatility. But here’s the truth – there is no AI without a Pi. Without process intelligence, AI agents work blindly.
The ongoing SAP migration wave explains why. An estimated 85-90% of SAP customers are still moving from ECC to S/4HANA. Moving to a new database doesn’t solve supply chain visibility – it just provides faster access to the same fragmented data.
Kerry Brown, change evangelist at Celonis, sees this across all industries.
“Organizations are shifting from PeopleSoft to Oracle or EBS to Fusion. A large number of people are in SAP,” she explains. “But they don’t really need a new ERP. They need to understand how work actually flows into the systems they already have.”
This requires end-to-end operational context. Process intelligence enables companies to extract and connect event data across systems, revealing how processes execute in real time.
This distinction becomes important when deploying autonomous agents. When visibility is fragmented, autonomous agents can easily make decisions that seem logical locally but cause downstream disruption. In a real-time context, AI can operate with clarity and precision, and supply chains can stay ahead of tariff-driven disruption.
Digital Twins: Empowering real-time feedback
All the companies highlighted in Cellosphere applied the same principle: Understand how processes run in systems in real time. Celonis PI creates a digital twin on top of existing systems, using its process intelligence graph to link orders, shipments, invoices and payments end-to-end. Dependencies that are missed by traditional integration become visible. The SAP delay was immediately apparent in its impact on Oracle, warehouse scheduling and customer delivery commitments.
“The platform brings together dispersed systems and departments with process data rich in business context that empowers AI agents to effectively transform operations,” says Daniel Brown, chief product officer at Celonis.
With this cross-system awareness, Celonis coordinates actions across complex workflows involving AI agents, humans, and automation – especially important when tariffs force faster decisions about suppliers, shipments, and customers.
Zero-copy integration enables quick modeling
A major advancement unveiled at Cellosphere – zero-copy integration with Databricks – removes another hurdle. Traditionally, analyzing supply chain data meant copying data from source systems to central warehouses, creating data latency.
Celonis Data Core now integrates directly with platforms like Databricks and Microsoft Fabric, querying billions of records in real-time without duplication. When trade policy changes, companies prepare options immediately, not after an overnight data refresh cycle.
Enhanced Task Mining extends this by connecting desktop activity – keystrokes, mouse clicks, screen scrolls – to business processes. It exposes the manual work invisible to system logs: the spreadsheet gymnastics, the email negotiations, the phone calls that keep the supply chain running during urgent changes.
Competitive advantage in volatile markets
Most companies cannot destroy or replace the systems that run critical operations – nor should they. Process intelligence offers a different path: create workflows from existing systems, deploy AI where it creates value, and continuously adapt as circumstances change. This “free the process” movement frees companies from rigid architecture without forcing wholesale replacement.
As global trade volatility increases, companies building models will move faster, make better decisions, and turn tariff chaos into competitive advantage – all while keeping existing ERPs running.
When the next wave of tariffs comes – and it will – companies won’t have days to respond. They will have hours. The question is not whether your ERP captures data. What matters is whether your systems connect the dots that fast.
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