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Navigating Economic Upheaval: How to Empower SAP
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As global markets brace for continued economic turbulence, U.S. policymakers have reignited trade tensions by announcing new and increased tariffs on a wide range of goods, including electric vehicles, batteries, steel, and solar products. This comes at a time when businesses are already grappling with inflation, rising interest rates, and ongoing supply chain constraints.
Tariff changes mean immediate cost shifts. For teams managing operational reporting and supply chain, this throws a wrench into standard processes. How can you keep your organization operating smoothly while pivoting to adjust for tariff-related change?
Here, we discuss how you can empower your SAP operations teams through times of economic uncertainty.
The Impact of Tariffs at a Glance
At the beginning of April 2025, the U.S. government announced tariff increases worth over $835 billion across critical manufacturing and technology imports. The goal was to protect domestic industries and reduce reliance on foreign supply chains. These changes directly impact:
- Cost of goods sold (COGS)
- Supplier contracts and logistics strategies
- Cash flow and profitability forecasting
- Decision timelines for sourcing and procurement
According to insightsoftware and Hanover Research’s recent Finance Team Trends Report, supply chain disruption is one of the top factors driving SAP teams to be more efficient. This is even more critical as SAP teams are faced with the challenge of making fast, data-driven decisions on a constantly-shifting foundation.
Shaping the Future: Conquering Finance Challenges in 2024: SAP Edition
The Hidden Cost of Static Reporting and IT Dependence
Out-of-the-box, SAP provides native reporting tools to cover an organization’s recurring financial and operational needs. However, when faced with requests from leadership that only custom reports can provide, the resulting reports require technical knowledge to complete.
According to an insightsoftware and Hanover Research survey on operational reporting, 98% of respondents distribute reports via a static PDF, and 95% of organizations generate either all or mostly static reports. This means stakeholders don’t have access to refreshable data to delve deeper and answer their own questions. With the market in constant flux, this could mean that newer information is available before they even open the PDF.
SAP reports fulfill typical recurring needs for finance and operations teams. But when unexpected challenges arise—like sweeping global tariffs—businesses often need insights that standard ERP-native reports can’t provide. Creating these custom reports, however, often falls to IT.
IT is tasked with maintaining the critical infrastructure of organizations. Reports for operations and finance therefore take a backseat to urgent IT tasks and can take days or weeks to generate. The relationship between operations and IT is a delicate one–they work in tandem, but our research shows that 76% of SAP-powered teams feel over-reliant on IT.
To reduce the risk of delays, seek out a technology solution that empowers operations and finance teams to generate their own reports with the ERP and other organizational data they have. This gives reporting back to those with the most business context while freeing up the IT department’s time for more proactive, value-added tasks like focusing on forward-thinking technological innovation.
Increasing Business Agility With Better Data Quality
In the face of macroeconomic uncertainty and regulatory complexity, the real competitive edge lies in the quality of your data. Tariffs and trade disruptions demand instant decisions—but poor data hygiene can pose a challenge for even the most sophisticated ERPs.
In the face of sudden changes to the economic climate, it becomes critical to have and maintain quality data. An automation tool can accelerate reporting, but it’s equally important to choose a solution that ensures data integrity at the source. Built-in validation, transformation logic, and business-context mapping help teams trust the numbers they’re seeing—and act with confidence.
No more second-guessing spreadsheets. Just clean, validated, timely SAP data where and when you need it.
As tariffs and macroeconomic pressures continue to reshape global business strategy, finance teams must act with speed, confidence, and data precision. insightsoftware’s Angles for SAP is purpose-built to help organizations stay ahead—delivering trusted insights from SAP faster, without the drag of traditional reporting processes.
If you’re relying on outdated tools or still exporting SAP data manually, now is the time to modernize your approach.
With Angles, finance and supply chain teams can quickly:
- Run what-if analysis on cost centers affected by tariff hikes
- Model the impact of increased supplier costs on margins and profit centers
- Simulate inventory and sourcing strategies
Want to see how Angles for SAP can help you model the financial impact of tariff increases or inflation scenarios? Check out our on-demand webinar on how to navigate supply chain disruptions with agile strategies.
Navigating SAP Supply Chain Disruptions with Agile Strategies
Watch Now
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