Navigating 2025 Tariffs: Smarter Procurement Strategies for Growth

With new tariffs creating financial uncertainty, businesses are reassessing their procurement strategies to stay ahead. Timothy Harfield, Head of Product Marketing at ORO Labs, shares insights on how companies can navigate cost increases, improve vendor data, and streamline procurement to stay competitive. In this Q&A, he discusses key strategies for adapting to shifting trade policies without disrupting operations.

Supply Chain 24/7: What steps should companies take immediately to prepare for the potential impact of the new tariffs?

Timothy Harfield: There’s a lot of uncertainty around potential new tariffs, but the real challenge isn’t preparing for specific policy changes – it’s about ensuring procurement teams have the agility to adapt to any disruption. Many procurement teams have already started using digital tools to manage increasing levels of complexity and unpredictability, leading to improved productivity and compliance at the task level. 

However, as more tools are introduced into complex organizations to address task-level inefficiency, process complexity grows, especially in distributed procurement teams where inefficiencies arise at system and team intersections. The final phase in an organization’s digital transformation journey must involve addressing process complexity. Procurement orchestration platforms like ORO streamline processes, enable easy rule changes with no-code development, and eliminate the need for traditional change management – presenting intuitive and unified end-user experiences that ensure 100% compliance.

SC247: How can businesses forecast and adapt to rising costs caused by tariffs without disrupting their operations?

TH: The key to adapting to rising costs is not just predicting them but ensuring procurement teams can respond quickly and effectively. Businesses have more data than ever, but managing it across multiple sources is a challenge. Instead of relying on manual processes that slow decision-making, organizations need systems that automatically detect cost increases, trigger pre-established workflows, and provide decision-makers with real-time, relevant data. That’s where procurement orchestration comes in. 

Procurement orchestration platforms unify data access across multiple live sources, automatically triggering workflows when risks arise or costs change. They clean and organize data, providing decision-makers with clear, AI-powered recommendations in real-time. Lastly, when a decision is made that involves a change in business rules, like changes to approved or recommended suppliers,  no-code development makes the changes seamless, ensuring employees follow the latest guidelines without manual oversight.

To adapt to rising costs, procurement teams need real-time visibility into cost changes, clear actions to take, and a way to implement new business rules without lengthy training or documentation updates. To do that, procurement teams need intuit…

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