Presented by Celonis
When tariff rates change overnight, corporations have 48 hours to model alternatives and act before competitors secure the most effective options. At Celosphere 2025 in Munich, enterprises demonstrated how they’re turning that chaos into competitive advantage — with quantifiable results that separate winners from losers.
Vinmar International: Theglobal plastics and chemicals distributor created a real-time digital twin of its $3B supply chain, cutting default expedites by greater than 20% and improving delivery agility across global operations.
Florida Crystals: One in every of America's largest cane sugar producers, the corporate unlocked tens of millions in working capital and strengthened supply chain resilience by eliminating manual rework across Finance, Procurement, and Inbound Supply. AI pilots now extend gains into 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 traditional ERP systems can’t close — connecting operational dots across ERP, finance, and logistics systems when seconds matter.
“The query isn’t whether disruptions will hit,” says Peter Budweiser, General Manager of Supply Chain at Celonis. “It’s whether your systems can show you what’s breaking fast enough to repair it.”
That visibility gap costs the typical company double-digit tens of millions in working capital and competitive positioning. As 54% of supply chain leaders face disruptions day by day, the pressure is shifting to AI agents that execute real actions: triggering purchase orders, rerouting shipments, adjusting inventory. But an autonomous agent acting on stale or siloed data could make million-dollar mistakes when tariff structures shift overnight.
Tariffs, as old as trade itself, have turn out to be the final word stress test for enterprise AI — revealing whether corporations truly understand their supply chains and whether their AI may be trusted to act.
Modern ERP: Data wealthy, insight poor
Supply chain leaders face a paradox: drowning in data while ravenous for insight. Traditional enterprise systems — SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft — capture every transaction meticulously.
SAP logs the acquisition order. Oracle tracks the shipment. The warehouse system records inventory movement. Each performs its function, but when tariffs change and corporations have to model alternative sourcing scenarios across all three concurrently, the info sits in silos.
“What’s modified is the speed at which disruptions cascade,” says Manik Sharma, Head of Supply Chain GTM AI at Celonis. “Traditional ERP systems weren’t built for today’s volatility.”
Corporations generate hundreds of reports showing what happened last quarter. They struggle to reply what happens if tariffs increase 25% tomorrow and wish to modify suppliers inside days.
Tariffs: The 48-hour scramble
Global trade volatility has transformed tariffs from predictable costs into strategic weapons. When recent rates drop with unprecedented frequency, input costs spike across suppliers, finance teams scramble to calculate margin impact, and procurement races to discover alternatives buried in disconnected systems where nobody knows if switching suppliers delays shipments or violates contracts.
By hour 48, competitors who already modeled scenarios execute supplier switches while late movers face capability constraints and premium pricing.
Process intelligence changes that dynamic by allowing businesses to repeatedly model “what-if” scenarios, showing leaders how tariff changes cascade through suppliers, contracts, production lines, warehouses, and customers. When rates hit, corporations can move inside hours as an alternative of days.
No AI without PI: Why process intelligence is non-negotiable for supply chains
AI and provide chains are mutually dependent: AI needs operational context, and provide chains need AI to maintain pace with volatility. But here's the reality — there isn’t any AI without PI. Without process intelligence, AI agents operate blindly.
The continuing SAP migration wave illustrates why. An estimated 85–90% of SAP customers are still moving from ECC to S/4HANA. Moving to newer databases doesn’t solve supply chain visibility — it provides faster access to the identical fragmented data.
Kerry Brown, a metamorphosis evangelist at Celonis, sees this across industries.
“Organizations are shifting from PeopleSoft to Oracle, or EBS to Fusion. The majority is in SAP,” she explains. “But what they actually need isn’t a brand new ERP. They need to grasp how work actually flows across systems they have already got.”
That requires end-to-end operational context. Process intelligence provides this by enabling corporations to extract and connect event data across systems, showing how processes execute in real time.
This distinction becomes critical when deploying autonomous agents. When visibility is fragmented, autonomous agents can easily make decisions that appear rational locally but create downstream disruption. With real-time context, AI can operate with clarity and precision, and provide chains can stay ahead of tariff-driven disruption.
Digital Twins: Powering real-time response
The businesses highlighted at Celosphere all applied the identical principle: understand how processes run across systems in real time. Celonis PI creates a digital twin above existing systems, using its Process Intelligence Graph to link orders, shipments, invoices, and payments end-to-end. Dependencies that traditional integrations miss turn out to be visible. A delay in SAP immediately reveals its impact across Oracle, warehouse scheduling, and customer delivery commitments.
“The platform brings together process data spanning systems and departments, enriched with business context that powers AI agents to remodel operations effectively,” says 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 rapid decisions about suppliers, shipments, and customers.
Zero-copy integration enables fast modeling
A key advancement unveiled at Celosphere — zero-copy integration with Databricks — removes one other barrier. Traditionally, analyzing supply chain data meant copying from source systems into central warehouses, creating data latency.
Celonis Data Core now integrates directly with platforms like Databricks and Microsoft Fabric, querying billions of records in near real time without duplication. When trade policy shifts, corporations model alternatives immediately, not after overnight 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 corporations can’t rip out and replace systems running critical operations — nor should they. Process intelligence offers a distinct path: compose workflows from existing systems, deploy AI where it creates value, and adapt repeatedly as conditions change. This “Free the Process” movement liberates corporations from rigid architectures without forcing wholesale substitute.
As global trade volatility intensifies, the businesses that model will move faster, make smarter decisions, and switch tariff chaos into competitive advantage — all while existing ERPs keep running.
When the following wave of tariffs hits — and it should — corporations won’t have days to reply. They’ll have hours. The query isn’t whether your ERP captures the info. It’s whether your systems connect the dots fast enough to matter.
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