The Tariff Impact Planning app, part of the spend management platform’s supply chain solution, is designed to help businesses navigate global trade policy, Coupa said in a Wednesday (Aug. 6) news release.
“A lasting trade war could be a black swan event with seismic impacts to supply chains, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the COVID-19 pandemic,” Dean Bain, Coupa senior vice president and general manager of supply chain, said in the release.
“As we’ve seen before, supply chains are extremely fragile, and the potential for severe disruptions create dramatic downstream business challenges for each of our customers.”
The release notes that more than half of CEOs say trade wars are the top geopolitical risk. To ease those concerns, Coupa says it’s designed the tool to let companies design supply chains that assess “current networks, future implications, and alternate strategies” to balance tariff reduction and operational efficiency, and safeguard their bottom lines.
As PYMNTS wrote Wednesday, tariff levels may fluctuate, but a lack of “visibility into future policy has become a binding constraint on strategic planning.”
Advertisement: Scroll to Continue
Data from PYMNTS Intelligence’s June 2025 edition of The 2025 Certainty Project, “Tariff Uncertainty Craters Confidence to Zero at Exposed Consumer Goods Companies,” shows an eye-opening number: not one chief financial officer — zero percent — in the exposed goods sector had any confidence in their company’s ability to navigate the current tariff environment.
The report points to an increasing imbalance between operational execution and strategic development. Rapid shifts in tariffs — sometimes implemented on short notice or as part of wider diplomatic disputes — can hinder the planning cycles that mid-sized firms rely on for capital budgeting and contract negotiation.
More than half of all finance chiefs across industries said they have delayed or canceled capital investments because of tariff policy volatility. The figure was even higher — 63% — among consumer goods firms with large levels of import exposure. These delays affect initiatives ranging from expansion into new markets to supply chain digitization and product innovation.
The report found that a growing number of CFOs are implementing software systems that support scenario planning and tariff exposure modeling. These tools aim to help firms assess how cost structures may shift under various policy outcomes — and to tweak their sourcing, pricing and inventory strategies accordingly.
“At the same time, companies themselves are rethinking what resilience means,” PYMNTS wrote. “Increasingly, strategic agility is replacing efficiency as the core operational objective — a shift that may ultimately make mid-market firms more robust, but also more conservative.”
For all PYMNTS B2B coverage, subscribe to the daily B2B Newsletter.
