Presented by Ceylonese
When tariff rates change overnight, companies have 48 hours to find alternative models and act before competitors secure the best options. at Cellosphere 2025 In Munich, enterprises demonstrated how they are turning this chaos into competitive advantage.
Winmer International: A global plastics and chemicals distributor created a real-time digital twin of its 3B supply chain, cutting default expediting by more than 20 percent and improving delivery agility across global operations.
Florida Crystal: One of the largest cane sugar producers in the US, the company has unlocked millions of working capital and strengthened supply chain flexibility by eliminating manual rework in finance, procurement and bound supply. AI Pilots now extend benefits to invoice processing, forecast maintenance, and order management.
Asos: The e-commerce fashion giant connected its end-to-end supply chain for complete transparency, reduced process variability, faster speed-to-market, and improved customer experience at scale.
The common thread here: process intelligence that bridges the gap traditional ERP systems can’t close – connecting the operational dots across ERP, finance and logistics systems when seconds matter.
“The question is not whether there will be disruptions,” says Peter Budweiser, general manager of supply chain at Ceylonese. “It’s whether your systems can show you what’s breaking fast enough to fix it.”
This visibility gap costs the average company double-digit millions in working capital and competitive positioning. As 54% of supply chain leaders face disruptions dailythe pressure is moving toward AI agents that execute real actions: triggering purchase orders, reordering shipments, adjusting inventory. But when tariff structures change overnight, an independent agent working on stale or siled data can make multimillion-dollar mistakes.
Tariffs, as old as trade itself, have become the ultimate stress test for enterprise AI — revealing whether companies truly understand their supply chains and whether their AI can be trusted to act.
Modern ERP: Data Rich, Insight Poor
Supply chain leaders face a paradox: hungry for insights while drowning in data. Traditional enterprise systems – SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft – carefully capture every transaction.
SAP logs the purchase order. Oracle tracks the shipment. Inventory movement is recorded in the warehouse system. Each performs its function, but when revenues change and companies need to simultaneously model alternative sourcing scenarios across all three, data sits in a rut.
“What has changed is the speed at which disruptions occur,” says Manik Sharma, head of supply chain GTMAI at Ceylonese. “Traditional ERP systems were not designed for today’s volatility.”
Companies generate thousands of reports that show what happened in the last quarter. They struggle to answer what happens if total tariffs rise by 25% and need to change suppliers within days.
Revenues: 48 hour rotation
Fluctuations in global trade have transformed tariffs from predictable costs to strategic weapons. When new rate cuts arrive with unusual frequency, input costs are inflated among suppliers, finance teams scramble to calculate margin impacts, and procurement races to identify alternatives buried in disorganized systems where no one knows to switch suppliers or breach contracts.
By hour 48, competitors who have already modeled the scenario execute supplier switches while latecomers face capacity constraints and premium prices.
Process intelligence enables change by allowing businesses to continuously model “what-if” scenarios, showing how the tariff changes cascade through suppliers, contracts, production lines, warehouses and customers. When rates come up, companies can move within hours instead of days.
No AI without PI: Why is process intelligence non-negotiable for supply chains?
AI and supply chain are interdependent: AI needs operational context, and supply chain needs AI to keep pace with fluctuations. But here is the truth. There is no AI without PI. Without process intelligence, AI agents operate blindly.
The ongoing SAP migration wave explains why. An estimated 85-90% of SAP customers are still moving from ECC to S/4HANA. Moving to a new database doesn’t solve supply chain exposure – it just provides faster access to the same fragmented data.
Carrie Brown, a change evangelist at Ceylonese, sees it across industries.
“Organizations are moving from PeopleSoft to Oracle, or EBS to Fusion. The bulk is in SAP,” she explains. “But what they really need is not a new ERP. They need to understand how it actually works within the existing systems.”
This requires an end-to-end operational context. Process intelligence enables companies to extract and integrate event data across systems, showing how processes perform in real time.
This distinction becomes important when deploying autonomous agents. When visibility is fragmented, autonomous agents can easily make decisions that appear rational locally but cause disruption downstream. With real-time context, AI can act with clarity and precision, and supply chains can stay ahead of tariff-driven disruption.
Digital Twins: Powering Real-Time Response
The companies highlighted on Cellosphere all applied the same principle: understand how processes run in real-time systems. Salonis Pi creates a digital twin on top of existing systems, using its Process Intelligence Graph to link orders, deliveries, invoices and payments end-to-end. does Dependencies that are missed by traditional integration become visible. Delays in SAP immediately have an impact on Oracle, warehouse schedules, and customer delivery commitments.
“The platform integrates execution data with processing systems and departments, enriched with business context that empowers AI agents to transform operations efficiently,” says Daniel Brown, Chief Product Officer, Celonis.
With this cross-system awareness, Salonis AI integrates functions across complex workflows involving agents, humans, and automation—especially important when revenues drive rapid decisions about suppliers, shipments, and customers.
Zero-copy integration enables instant modeling
A key development in the cellosphere was unveiled. Zero copy integration With data bricks – Removes another obstacle. Traditionally, analyzing supply chain data meant copying data from source systems to central warehouses, creating data delays.
Selonis Data Core now integrates directly with platforms such as Databikes and Microsoft Fabricquerying billions of records in real-time without duplication. When trade policy changes, companies model alternatives immediately, not after overnight data.
Enhanced Task Mining extends this by linking desktop activity – keystrokes, mouse clicks, screen scrolls – to business processes. This exposes the manual work hidden to system logs: the spreadsheet gymnastics, the email negotiations, the phone calls that keep the supply chain moving during rapid changes.
Competitive advantage in volatile markets
Most companies can’t rip out and replace the systems that run critical operations — and don’t. Process Intelligence offers a different path: compose workflows from existing systems, deploy AI where it creates value, and continuously adapt as conditions change. This “process-independent” movement frees companies from rigid architectures without forcing wholesale change.
As volatility in global trade intensifies, companies that model move faster, make smarter decisions, and turn tariff chaos into a competitive advantage—while existing ERPs keep running.
When the next wave of rates hits — and it will — companies won’t have days to respond. They will have hours. The question is not whether your ERP captures the data. It’s whether your systems connect the dots quickly.
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