Businesses are facing mounting pressure from every direction, from tariffs and regulations to evolving consumer demands. Discover four actionable strategies that can help you stay ahead of the curve, from streamlining supplier onboarding to scaling into new markets with localized content. Learn how the right tools and the right mindset can turn uncertainty into opportunity, future-proofing your product experience operations for whatever comes next.
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From sweeping tariffs to fast-evolving regulations, today’s businesses are navigating a minefield of unpredictable challenges.
The latest curveball? A new 10% universal tariff introduced by the U.S., with even steeper rates for imports from roughly 60 countries. The move has left many companies bracing for price hikes and scrambling to reconfigure their supply chains to soften the blow.
And it’s not just tariffs causing turmoil. The European Union is preparing to enforce Digital Product Passports (DPPs) within the next year - a bold step toward greater transparency and sustainability. While this initiative promises progress toward a circular economy, it demands deep visibility into the supply chain; something few companies can claim to have today.
Supply chain disruptions, impending tariffs, evolving customer demands, a complex regulatory environment – how are businesses expected to stay ahead of the curve when it feels impossible to see what's coming next?
While you can’t predict every policy change or market shift, you can build an organization that’s flexible, agile, and prepared for change. Here are four practical strategies to help future-proof your operations and keep you ready for whatever comes next.
When tariffs change or compliance rules tighten, one of the first areas under pressure is the supplier network. Delays in sourcing or onboarding new suppliers can ripple through the entire organization, slowing time-to-market and impacting revenue.
That’s why it’s critical to build a streamlined system for supplier collaboration. Whether you're switching suppliers to reduce costs or sourcing more sustainable materials to meet environmental regulations, the process needs to be fast, transparent, and standardized.
Look for ways to digitize supplier onboarding and enable real-time collaboration. A centralized platform like Akeneo Supplier Data Manager provides a one-stop shop where suppliers can upload product specs, documentation, and compliance certifications, reducing back-and-forth and ensuring you're always working with the latest information; electrical supplies distributor Rexel was able to enrich 800,000 to the international classification standard ETIM with Akeneo SDM.
The more efficient this process is, the more confident you can be when making quick changes under pressure - without compromising product quality or launch timelines.
As customer behaviors shift and economic headwinds hit different regions, agility in your go-to-market strategy is key. One region may be impacted by new import duties, while another remains stable. One sales channel may be booming, while another slows to a crawl.
Companies that can pivot quickly (launching a direct-to-consumer site, expanding a marketplace presence, scaling back in certain regions, etc.) gain a major competitive edge.
To do this successfully, businesses need product data that’s channel-ready and easily activated wherever customers are shopping, which is where a solution like Akeneo Activation can be a game-changer. Akeneo Activation is purpose-built to help businesses efficiently syndicate high-quality product information across dozens of global channels, enabling teams to manage, optimize, and distribute tailored product content from a centralized location - whether it's for a webstore, mobile app, social commerce platform, marketplace, or brick-and-mortar catalog. With built-in tools to validate, enrich, and transform content to match each channel’s specific requirements, you can accelerate time-to-market and ensure consistency, no matter how fast things are changing.
So when the business needs to double down on Amazon, pull back from a third-party reseller, or launch a brand-new channel in a new region, you’re not starting from scratch. You’re activating the right content, in the right format, at the right time.
Rather than juggling product specs, sustainability credentials, and compliance documentation across disconnected spreadsheets, legacy systems, and siloed teams, businesses need a centralized platform where all product data is stored, governed, and accessible to the right people.
Akeneo PIM is designed to do exactly that. By empowering businesses to centralize, manage, and enrich product information at scale, a composable PIM system like Akeneo ensures that every team, from merchandising to marketing to compliance, works from a unified set of accurate, up-to-date data, and that can lead to real cost savings - for example, AMG Medical saw a 60% reduction in catalog management costs after implementing Akeneo PIM. With powerful data governance, workflow automation, and enrichment tools, Akeneo PIM makes it easier to maintain consistency and quality across all channels and product lines.
This not only supports compliance with emerging regulations like DPPs, but also reduces errors, speeds up product launches, and improves the overall customer experience. And when change does come—whether it’s a new regulation, market opportunity, or supplier switch—you’ll already have the solid foundation in place to adapt with confidence.
When conditions become unfavorable in one region, entering new markets—or doubling down on others—can provide much-needed growth. But too often, expansion plans are delayed or derailed by the complexity of creating localized, relevant content for each new market.
The key is to build a scalable localization process in advance. That means centralizing product data, leveraging translation workflows, and ensuring you can easily tailor product information to meet the needs of local customers, from language and measurement units to cultural context and buying habits.
The good news is that Akeneo can help there as well. With Akeneo Activation, you can distribute tailored product information to any channel, in any region, all from a central platform, ensuring that the right content gets delivered to the right place in the right way at the right time. Akeneo also offers AI-powered translation and localization tools that dramatically simplify the process of adapting product content for new languages and cultures - FELCO was able to scale their eCommerce presence from 10 markets to 170 in just six months with Akeneo.
By ensuring that product descriptions, features, and marketing copy are not just translated but fully localized for tone, terminology, and context, Akeneo enables fewer errors, faster launches, and better customer engagement in every market you enter.
With the right tools and processes in place, localization becomes a growth lever rather than a bottleneck. And in a volatile global market, having that kind of flexibility could make all the difference.
There’s no crystal ball in business. Tariffs will rise. Regulations will shift. Consumer behavior will evolve. And companies that cling to rigid, outdated systems will find themselves constantly playing catch-up.
But the answer isn’t to try and prepare for every scenario; it’s to build systems and strategies that let you adapt quickly to any scenario. That means modernizing your supplier onboarding, making your product information channel-ready, centralizing your data, and preparing your content for global reach.
The businesses that thrive through uncertainty won’t be the ones who guessed right. They’ll be the ones who build their organization with resilience, agility, and adaptability in mind. So, the next time the unexpected happens (and it will), you won’t be scrambling. You’ll be ready.
Our Akeneo Experts are here to answer all the questions you might have about our products and help you to move forward on your PX journey.
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