For global businesses, tariffs have evolved from being a predictable cost of doing business to a volatile disruptor of operational stability. From the retaliatory measures following Section 301 to Brazil’s 2025 sweeping tax reform, today’s trade environment is anything but business-as-usual.
The challenge? Tariffs no longer just impact the supply chain; they ripple across procurement, manufacturing, sales and fulfillment, logistics, finance, compliance, and even IT. CFOs grapple with shifting cost structures. Supply chain leaders face disruptions in landed cost predictability. Tax and trade professionals must navigate a labyrinth of classification codes, origin rules, and new duty impositions, often without warning.
A recent report found that CEOs globally cited macroeconomic volatility (29%) and inflation (27%) as their largest concern. Meanwhile, a recent analysis confirms that organizations with siloed trade compliance processes are more likely to experience delays or fines due to misclassification, origin errors, or missed regulatory shifts.
The good news? There are pragmatic, proven ways to tackle tariff barriers without derailing operations. This article explores five real-world strategies that global organizations are using today, not just to survive tariff volatility, but to transform it into a strategic advantage. From automation and advanced rulings to tariff drawbacks and financial modeling these are all enabled by enterprise alignment, these tactics reflect a modern, proactive approach to global trade compliance.
Strategy #1: Automate Classification and Compliance Workflows Across Borders
Why It Matters:
Manual tariff classification is one of the most error-prone aspects of international trade. According to a 2024 Gartner survey on customs and trade compliance, 39% of compliance, legal, and privacy leaders believe their organizations need to adopt strategies that keep pace with new regulatory requirements, underscoring the importance of accurate compliance measures.
As regulatory complexity increases, especially with evolving schemes like Brazil’s new tax reform, even minor classification errors can lead to major compliance fallout.
What To Do:
Deploying AI-driven tools like Oracle GTM Cloud’s classification engine and integration with third-party data providers allows businesses to standardize and automate how products are classified across jurisdictions. This reduces human error, ensures harmonized treatment of goods across countries, and enables quicker adjustments as rules shift, such as retaliatory tariffs or regional trade changes like Mercosur or USMCA evolutions and even the impact of court rulings.
Strategy #2: Centralize Trade Data for Real-Time Visibility and Audit Readiness
Why It Matters:
In a 2024 EY Global Trade Survey, multinational companies cited fragmented trade data as a key barrier to timely and accurate tariff reporting. When import/export, broker, and ERP systems don’t speak to each other, it’s nearly impossible to assess tariff exposure or prepare defensible audit documentation—especially under increased scrutiny due to retaliatory tariffs or regional reforms like Brazil’s evolving ICMS system.
What To Do:
Organizations must break down silos and create a single source of truth for trade data, covering import volumes, tariff classifications, country-of-origin determinations, preferential agreements, and broker declarations. A centralized system like Oracle GTM Cloud provides a unified compliance hub, streamlining both internal reporting and external audits. GTM drives organizational compliance and process related command and control needed to support audits, duty drawbacks and management of fallbacks.
Strategy #3: Automate Classification and Origin Management to Reduce Risk Exposure
Why It Matters:
Incorrect tariff classification or origin declarations can trigger severe financial and reputational consequences. According to U.S. CBP, misclassification errors were among the top five causes of trade compliance penalties in FY2024. These errors often result from manual processes or inconsistent sourcing data across regions, especially when suppliers operate in jurisdictions affected by shifting trade regulations, such as Brazil’s tax reform.
What To Do:
Automate the classification and origin tracking process using a global trade management solution that incorporates product master data, supplier inputs, and rules of origin from preferential trade agreements. Solutions like Oracle GTM can automatically assign and validate HS codes, manage supplier declarations, and assess substantial transformation thresholds to ensure regulatory accuracy.
Strategy #4: Centralize Trade Compliance Data to Enable Real-Time Decision-Making
Why It Matters:
Disjointed compliance data across departments like procurement, finance, logistics, and legal, leads to delayed decisions and costly errors. In a volatile tariff environment, where updates can occur with little notice, agility depends on a unified view of risk exposure, duty obligations, and country-specific compliance requirements.
What To Do:
Establish a single source of truth for trade data through an integrated compliance hub that pulls from ERP, GTM, logistics, and supplier systems. This hub should consolidate product classifications, origin determinations, licenses, and documentation in one place—automating the audit trail and simplifying global coordination.
Strategy #5: Develop a Cross-Functional Tariff Response Task Force
Why It Matters:
Tariff management is more than a supply chain problem, it’s a business-wide challenge. When procurement, tax, compliance, and operations act in silos, companies often find themselves reacting too slowly, overpaying duties, or missing out on mitigation strategies like First Sale for Export, country of origin rulings, or FTZ utilization.
According to EY’s 2024 Global Trade Survey, multinationals with a formalized trade governance structure report greater cost savings and faster compliance response times than those without one. A cross-functional task force ensures your response to tariff changes is both strategic and operationally sound.
What To Do:
Create a centralized team that includes representatives from procurement, tax, compliance, logistics, and legal. This group should meet regularly to monitor global tariff changes, assess operational impact, and quickly activate mitigation tactics—whether it’s switching suppliers, leveraging drawbacks, or adjusting HTS classifications.
Turning Tariff Barriers Into Business Advantages
Recent developments have proven that tariff shifts can happen at the blink of an eye and regulatory frameworks only grow more complex. Companies can no longer afford a fragmented, reactive approach to trade compliance.
These strategies we shared with you aren’t just theory. They’re proven tactics implemented by global organizations that chose to make tariff management a strategic pillar, more so than a back-office obligation.
What’s also true is that transformation doesn’t happen in isolation. It takes modern systems, integrated processes, and expert guidance.
With decades of experience in Oracle Global Trade Management, compliance automation, and enterprise digital transformation, ITC helps organizations future-proof their operations against global trade volatility.
Ready to make tariff complexity a competitive advantage? Let’s build your roadmap.
The ITC Advantage
Smart workflows
IT Convergence helps clients implement smart logic-driven workflows within Oracle GTM, which help in the automation of classification updates, assignment of fallback rules, and create alerts around outliers for human review.
Cross-functional data strategies
IT Convergence helps trade, tax, and compliance leaders design cross-functional data strategies powered by Oracle GTM and connected to JD Edwards, Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP, and third-party brokers. This real-time visibility equips decision-makers with dashboards to anticipate tariff costs, run “what-if” simulations, and maintain audit-readiness 24/7, which are critical for withstanding CBP inquiries, managing duty drawbacks, responding to policy shifts, and protecting margins.
Compliance confidence
We build customized classification workflows, integrate supplier declaration capture, and train teams to maintain data quality. Our clients benefit from streamlined cycle times, improved duty recovery, and a significant drop in CBP inquiries and penalties, all while improving compliance confidence across product lines and geographies.
Rich integrations
IT Convergence brings deep expertise in integrating Oracle GTM with ERP and supply chain platforms, ensuring data is not only centralized but intelligently orchestrated. We help clients build a “compliance cockpit” that supports real-time scenario planning, tariff impact modeling, and proactive alerts. The result? Faster responses, smarter sourcing decisions, and less regulatory firefighting.
People and process alignment
IT Convergence helps align people and processes. Experts help you stand up cross-functional working groups, define governance models, and implement workflow automation through Oracle GTM and ERP integrations. The result is a proactive tariff playbook built for repeatable action, not reactive scrambling.
Disclaimer:
The information presented in this blog is for educational and informational purposes only. IT Convergence is a technology and ERP systems advisory firm. While we closely monitor the tax, trade, and tariff volatility landscape, we focus on helping organizations prepare their Oracle environments accordingly. We do not provide tax or legal advice, nor do we interpret tax legislation.
We recommend that all organizations consult with qualified tax or legal advisors to assess their specific obligations based on industry, entity classification, and jurisdiction.
IT Convergence supports customers in configuring, optimizing, and future-proofing their systems for compliance but does not assume responsibility for legal or fiscal determinations.
