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Global tariffs and geopolitical disruptions have created uncertainty and threatened the stability of supply chains worldwide. Supply chain planning has traditionally assumed a fairly stable environment, but that‘ steady state’ is gone. With global trade policies shifting rapidly, business leaders face logistics bottlenecks, rising costs, and dilemmas over where to source from. So how can business leaders regain certainty? Process intelligence has an important role to play, helping to work out how much they are exposed to tariffs and adjust their sourcing strategies accordingly.
Process intelligence offers supply chain leaders the opportunity to untangle complex tariff issues by offering an overview of what really happens within the business and allowing them to simulate the effect of changes such as the implementation of tariffs. Traditional ERP platforms are linear, so they cannot capture the full complexity of a supply chain. Process intelligence, however, focuses on the real flow of information and product across the supply chain, capturing data from everything from Excel spreadsheets to internal systems, and revealing processes as they actually work by bridging the‘ gaps’ between departments, systems, and suppliers.
This technology can help supply chain leaders highlight routes that may be threatened and simulate exposure. This helps them to understand the impact of tariffs on spending and margins and thereby prioritize key materials or identify alternative suppliers. Paired with artificial intelligence( AI), process intelligence enables fast decision-making at a global scale, which is a key differentiator in an often-changing world. need to mobilize alternative suppliers quickly, for example by buying locally as opposed to importing. This can quickly become complicated, especially when products are assembled from parts from multiple vendors situated globally, like car manufacturers that have over time developed global networks through which thousands of different parts are sourced from around the world, to take one example. With tariffs applied, a company needs to swiftly find a way to keep supply flowing, while also calculating the impact on the cost of finished goods.
Process intelligence lets business leaders‘ control the controllables,’ homing in on what might be affected by tariffs and working with hypotheses about what might happen next. This helps not only to assess and predict vulnerabilities, but to mitigate the impact of rapid changes. Modern supply chains are global and interconnected, which means dealing with tariffs is even more complex. Process intelligence offers a shared platform where multiple stakeholders can work together to deal with disruptions, breaking down silos which historically meant that partners were making decisions based on different, incomplete sets of information. Using the data gleaned from process intelligence will empower partners to align on common goals and deal with tariff-related issues.
Mitigating impact
Global supply chains can be very intricate, often involving hundreds or even thousands of people, orders, and Stock Keeping Units( SKUs). In tariff management, businesses may
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