Celonis has been helping customers get their supply chains in shape for more than a decade — and we have the in-house subject matter expertise to show for it. Here’s what our supply chain pros think will be important for supply chain teams to pay attention to in 2025.
Still in the midst of 2025 planning? Us too.
As we consider the year ahead, we asked our own internal supply chain experts what people working in (or with!) supply chain roles should look out for. We can’t tell you exactly what to expect with TBD tariffs or surprise global events, but we can discuss the supply chain shifts we’ll see regardless of the news. Here are four we’ll be keeping an eye on.
“We're all sick of hearing about disruptions, but the reality is they haven't gone away. What has is the urgency to overcome them, “ says Alejandra Quinones, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Supply Chain at Celonis.
But, according to Quinones, this more laissez-faire approach creeping in after 1-2 years of declining volatility won’t serve organizations well in the long run. Many of the traditional methods that businesses have been leaning on to deal with disruption — like keeping lots of extra inventory on hand — are becoming so expensive that fewer enterprises will be able to continually use them.
Instead, to deal with the next inevitable pandemic (sorry to bring the mood down), climate-related crisis, geopolitical event, or surprise snag or disruption, companies will be forced to seek out more creative, forward-looking strategies for building supply chain resilience.
Says Quinones, “As the cost of goods, manufacturing and logistics have risen, organizations won’t be able to get away with high inventory buffers. I think this will lead to people looking for ways to quickly take action in other ways — which, when it comes to supply chain, requires understanding what's happening cross-functionally and figuring out the impact of taking any action on those other departments.”
What does “taking action in other ways” actually mean? Well, it could entail:
The best way to get started with all of this — and do it in a way that doesn’t cause outsize consequences for your existing supply chain in the process? With the real-time cross-functional observability, AI enablement, and process expertise of the Celonis Process Intelligence Platform.
Sustainability is sometimes framed as a regional concern, in part because standards for it can differ substantially by country. However, if recent years are any indication, we’re in the beginning stages of a worldwide shift towards more sustainable supply chain practices, whether required by law or not.
On top of governmental demand for more precise sustainability data, organizations are also realizing that a granular understanding of sustainability impact can be good business because it reveals weaknesses or value opportunities within their supply chains, such as:
For example, Archroma used the Celonis Process Intelligence Platform to get an in-depth understanding of their shipping emissions at every stage — and, with that knowledge in hand, they were able to transform how they bundled and routed more than 150,000 shipments, leading to significant savings in both CO2 and costs.
So how can other businesses follow in Archroma’s footsteps, and find ways to track, organize, and actually use all of this supply chain sustainability data?
Per Janina Bauer, Global Head of Sustainability at Celonis, “Companies will need to establish systems that can monitor, adapt, and report on sustainability efforts in real time to ensure compliance and avoid potentially costly penalties - at the speed of business operations.”
Bauer says companies need a “single source of truth,” or, more specifically, an integrated, living compliance tracking solution that gathers regulatory updates, ESG data and business processes in one place, like the Celonis Process Intelligence Platform.
Advanced platforms like Celonis, she says, will be “crucial in automatically tracking and aligning operations with evolving regulations, reducing compliance risks, and simplifying audits,” ensuring sustainability practices “align with internal business goals and adhere to global standards, supporting transparency and building stakeholder trust but also business success”.
The supply chain has, historically, been many companies’ main focus for sustainability efforts, but Bauer emphasizes that businesses can only turn this increased level of sustainability tracking to their full advantage if teams are working in lockstep across the organization.
This means sustainability will no longer be the sole purview of supply chain roles. Instead, colleagues across IT, operations, finance, and even the C-suite will need to work together with supply chain teams to ensure that not only are regulations met, but the corresponding data are put to good business use.
Hot tip: All of this is easier when everyone’s working from the same platform.
To meet the challenges of a more complex world, teams need to get better (and faster!) at working together. Yes, this sounds suspiciously like the point we just made above, but stay with us!
Silos have long been an issue within supply chains, with different processes spawning widely varying software, KPIs, and ways of working that can make collaboration tough. But this silo-ization is an urgent problem, according to Peter Budweiser, Global Head of Supply Chain at Celonis.
And the proven approach he says is critical for busting through silos? Supply chain command centers. “Command center platforms, leveraging unified data systems, are poised to be the cornerstone of collaboration in the next year, particularly within supply chain operations,” per Budweiser. “Ensuring supply chain teams have unified, contextualized data from across the enterprise will allow them to align around shared metrics and data sources, fostering better collaboration both across functions as well as between the executive and operational levels.”
This is because a command center approach goes beyond the more well-known control tower approach. Where a control tower is specific to an individual function, like Logistics, for example, a command center is meant for the myriad processes that make up the supply chain. And where a control tower offers visibility only, a command center offers action.
Supply chain control tower
Supply chain command center
Because of this, enterprises using a command center approach to supply chain management can not only see a more holistic picture of the real-time state of their supply chain — they can also act on it, improving areas that aren’t working at their peak from within the command center itself, and seizing opportunities to create value.
“By capturing real-time data across departments via a command center approach, enterprises can empower every level of the organization,” says Budweiser, “resulting in the ability to respond to supply chain disruptions and optimize operations in real time, enhancing resilience and agility.”
