Navigating Tariff Chaos: How Real-Time Process intelligence is Redefining supply Chain Resilience
global trade is a pressure cooker. recent years have demonstrated, with stark clarity, the disruptive power of tariffs and geopolitical shifts on supply chains. Businesses are no longer operating in a predictable environment; they need agility, visibility, and the ability to react instantly to changing conditions. The traditional approach of relying on static data and siloed systems is simply insufficient. A new paradigm is emerging, powered by Process Intelligence, and it’s enabling companies to not just survive, but thrive amidst volatility.
This article delves into how real-time process intelligence, exemplified by solutions like Celonis, is fundamentally changing supply chain management, offering a path to resilience and competitive advantage in a world defined by uncertainty.
The Problem with Fragmented Visibility: A Recipe for Disruption
For decades, companies have invested heavily in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems – SAP, Oracle, and others – to manage core business functions. However, these systems often operate as islands of data. While each system excels at its specific task, they rarely offer a holistic, end-to-end view of critical processes.
This fragmentation is notably dangerous when deploying Artificial Intelligence (AI) and autonomous agents. AI, while powerful, is only as good as the data it receives. Without a complete understanding of how processes flow across systems, AI can make locally optimal decisions that inadvertently create significant downstream problems. Imagine an AI-driven system optimizing warehouse efficiency without considering the impact of a tariff change on inbound shipments – the result could be a surge in inventory of untaxed goods, followed by a costly scramble to adjust.
The key is context. Real-time context allows AI to operate with precision,enabling supply chains to anticipate and proactively address disruptions like tariff-driven changes. It’s about understanding the ripple effect of every decision.
Digital Twins: the Foundation for Real-Time Response
The core principle driving this shift is the creation of a digital twin – a dynamic, virtual representation of your actual business processes.This isn’t just about visualization; it’s about creating a living model that mirrors the real world in near real-time.
Celonis Process Intelligence (PI) is a leading example of this approach. It builds a digital twin above existing systems, leveraging its unique Process Intelligence Graph to connect disparate data points – orders, shipments, invoices, payments – end-to-end. This reveals dependencies that traditional integration methods often miss. A delay in SAP, for instance, is immediately visible in its impact on Oracle, warehouse scheduling, and ultimately, customer delivery commitments.
“The platform brings together process data spanning systems and departments,enriched with business context that powers AI agents to transform operations effectively,” explains Daniel Brown,Chief Product Officer at Celonis.
This cross-system awareness is crucial for coordinating actions across complex workflows, involving AI agents, human intervention, and robotic process automation (RPA). When tariffs demand rapid adjustments to suppliers, shipments, or customer pricing, this unified view is the difference between proactive adaptation and reactive firefighting.
Zero-Copy Integration: Eliminating Data Latency
Historically, analyzing complex supply chain data required extracting information from source systems and loading it into central data warehouses. This process, while common, introduced significant data latency. By the time the data was available for analysis, it was often outdated, rendering it less valuable for time-sensitive decisions.
Celonis has addressed this challenge with zero-copy integration. Through partnerships with leading data platforms like Databricks and Microsoft Fabric, Celonis Data Core can now query billions of records directly within those platforms, in near real-time, without the need for data duplication.
This means that when trade policies shift, companies can instantly model option scenarios – evaluating the cost implications of different suppliers, rerouting shipments, or adjusting pricing strategies – without waiting for overnight data refresh cycles.
Furthermore, Enhanced Task Mining adds another layer of visibility. By capturing desktop activity – keystrokes, mouse clicks, screen scrolls – it uncovers the manual workarounds that often keep supply chains functioning during urgent changes. These “hidden processes” – spreadsheet manipulations, email negotiations, phone calls – are frequently enough critical, yet invisible to traditional system logs.
From Reactive to Proactive: Gaining a Competitive Edge
The beauty of Process Intelligence isn’t about replacing existing systems. Most companies can’t, and shouldn’t, undertake massive system overhauls. Instead, it’s about composing workflows from the systems you already have, strategically deploying AI where it delivers the greatest value, and continuously adapting as conditions
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