How AI and the Celonis Platform enable supply chain managers to handle tariffs and build a more resilient value chain

Think about headline disruptions of recent years: COVID-19, Suez, Baltimore, Red Sea attacks. Or extreme weather events and shifting customer demand. They’re all examples of macroeconomic or geopolitical developments that have an acute impact on supply chains.

More than half of supply chain leaders (54%) now see disruptions as a day-to-day occurrence. Today, that volatility concerns tariffs, which are changing the global business environment tremendously, even beyond supply chains.

The imposition of sweeping tariffs on imported goods will have a profound impact on global supply chains. It’s a serious challenge for the stability and fluidity that supply chains need to operate effectively. And it’s a challenge supply chain leaders have got to figure out quickly, to keep their companies’ goods moving as cost effectively as possible.

How to start dealing with disruption

It’s vital to understand which parts of your organization and supply chain are affected. Only with this visibility can you explore corrective actions to deploy. In the case of tariff management, that could mean quickly mobilizing alternative suppliers, such as importing locally as opposed to from other countries.

But this can be complex. Think of a car manufacturer that’s sourced thousands of different parts from countries around the world. With various tariffs applied, the company needs a scalable answer to uninterrupted supply as well as calculating the impact on finished goods. And supply chain professionals have to make the transition seamless to avoid huge losses from interrupted productivity.

Again, this is a function of understanding each element of the supply chain in minute detail, how processes interact, how to leverage supplier networks, and how to optimize operations to address the new business landscape. You start dealing with disruption by defining the impact and using your fastest levers for change: Enterprise AI.

A data-driven solution

So we’ve established that there are two components to supply chain agility and resilience. The first is understanding as early as possible which parts of your supply chain will be affected and how. Once you know what you need to react to, the other aspect is identifying the best action to take. The Celonis Platform can help you both understand and respond to supply chain volatility.

Celonis takes a data-driven supply chain approach. Instead of modeling your supply chain and using that as the foundation for planning, simulating, and making decisions, the Celonis Platform consolidates real-time data from every source system to visualize how supply chains actually run, perform and are connected. This objective supply chain visibility is the foundation for better decision making.

When it comes to formulating an answer, that’s where automation, orchestration and AI come in. The Celonis Platform gives your AI the context it needs to give you an understanding of your supply chain’s optimization potential, recommending improvements which you can evaluate via a process digital twin.

This offers a bigger opportunity than mere visibility. The Celonis Platform enables more autonomous decision-making by using the data-driven foundation to enable the kind of AI agents, automations or workflows that Gartner predicts will power 25% of supply chain KPI reporting by 2028. With the Celonis Platform extracting and standardizing accurate data from across the business, these AI applications are fueled with the crucial process data and business context they need to make appropriate decisions.

Zooming out to the bigger picture, these capabilities mean the Celonis Platform can serve as a command center for the supply chain. With its data-driven approach, cross-system visibility, and process orchestration, the Celonis Platform brings insights and action together in one solution. As a single source of truth for measuring, monitoring, and enforcing process conformance, you can use the Celonis Platform to optimize macro supply chain performance as well as specific use cases. A consolidated solution for an increasingly complex supply chain landscape.