Only the agile survive: Scenario planning for tariff uncertainty

Recently imposed US tariffs have triggered widespread economic disruption and reduced global trade. While the full financial impact is not yet known, one report estimates that global economic losses could reach $1.4 trillion.

Your business has likely already felt the effects. Rising tariffs have a direct impact on profit margins and cost structures, triggering cascading effects on pricing, demand, and cash flow. They also shake investor confidence.

This type of volatility impacts investment, hiring activity, productivity, and innovation. It also increases risk. Changing tariffs are set to have a far-reaching effect across every organization, forcing you to rethink and reshape your business strategy — likely more than once.

The situation calls for the ability to instantly reforecast, reallocate resources, and reroute capital to optimize operations. And with multiple potential scenarios that could play out, planning tools need to be agile and foster collaboration to optimize your decisions.

The new playbook for business planning

No strategic shift can be made in isolation. Every function of your organization must be aligned. This requires the real-time integration of data from across the business, in parallel with intelligent automation that streamlines forecasting and reporting processes. 

Bringing finance, supply chain, sales, and HR together in one planning platform will allow you to conduct holistic trade-off analysis and evaluate the impact of strategic shifts against operational realities.

• Finance leaders need to provide fast, accurate metrics and forecasts, so your business can confidently pivot. They also need a planning solution that offers transparency and auditability, so they can explain the financial impacts of tariff policy and defend strategic decisions.
• Supply chain and retail leaders must reassess their capacity to prevent production gaps, meet demand, and control costs. In order to do so, they need accurate demand forecasts and inventory planning to mitigate the unpredictable cost and availability of goods. And they need timely data to support decisions to source materials from different vendors, or switch production to another location.
• Sales and marketing leaders must understand evolving consumer priorities, sentiments, and purchasing habits. They should be prepared to adapt their go-to-market strategy when necessary, whether that's entering new markets, exploring different distribution channels, or adjusting sales team quotas.
• Workforce and HR leaders must be ready to respond to workforce shifts and changes in hiring needs. This includes understanding what it means to reallocate staff to fill talent gaps and how headcount adjustments will affect overall operations.

With the trade tariff picture unclear and unsettled, you must plan for various potential outcomes and position your business to move forward on the optimal path. To protect profitability and balance cash flow, you must be able to run dynamic “what-if” analyses to understand the true cost implications across SKUs, regions, and suppliers.

The ability to model different tariff scenarios across functions in real time is vital to choosing the best course of action and responding faster than your competitors.

How to move from insights to action, faster

Traditional planning tools simply cannot provide the agility your business needs. These slow, siloed systems will not provide integrated, real-time data or create alignment between teams. As a result, revenue targets are missed, profits turn to loss, and headcounts are reduced. 

A planning platform that equips the entire business to respond effectively to economic uncertainty can make the difference between surviving the current tariff situation or becoming one of its casualties.

Anaplan links decisions and operations across an organization, connecting strategic and financial plans to operational and product tactics.

• Spreadsheets and disconnected processes are replaced with a single source of truth for smarter, faster decisions.
• Business leaders get a holistic view of all available data from every team, and all teams have visibility of the same information.
• Users can query data in natural language, for a complete understanding of what's happening across the business.
• Business leaders can model scenarios and strategies in real time to help anticipate tariff shifts and understand the domino effect across the entire organization.

Once you have approved a strategic shift, Anaplan provides the agile processes and alignment between teams required to rapidly implement it.

Opportunity awaits

Five years ago, it was the pandemic. Today, it’s tariffs. Tomorrow is anyone’s guess.

There will always be economic uncertainty, but making the right decisions quickly will enable your business to leverage the growth prospects that arise from shifting dynamics.

Anaplan empowers businesses of all sizes and industries to stay agile in the face of change. With real-time data, dynamic scenario modeling, end-to-end visibility, and AI-driven insights, you can assess the impact of tariff shifts across your organization, then act with speed and confidence.