Earlier visibility into duties, freight, compliance, and finance can help leaders sharpen decisions before costs and risks are locked in.
Landed cost has always shaped global supply chain performance. But it carries more weight today because the decisions behind it are moving faster, changing more often, carrying greater financial consequences, and reaching deeper into the business.
Tariffs change the economics of a sourcing lane, compliance requirements delay movement, and transportation disruptions raise the cost of keeping a customer promise. Meanwhile, finance teams may not see the full impact of duties, freight, taxes, insurance, or working capital until after a decision has been made.
For many leaders, the challenge is timing. By the time the full cost and risk of moving goods come into view, the business may already be managing margin pressure, compliance exposure, working capital strain, or service issues that could have been addressed earlier. For companies with global supply bases, a natural starting point is to assess dependence on single-source suppliers and imports from countries where tariffs, logistics constraints, or compliance requirements could materially change landed cost.
Many organizations already have pieces of the answer: enterprise resource planning (ERP) capabilities, transportation management systems, global trade management tools, carrier data, procurement data, finance data, and analytics. The opportunity is to connect those pieces around the decisions with the greatest potential business impact.
That’s why landed cost visibility is becoming a more important decision capability. When trade, transportation, procurement, and finance teams can work from a clearer shared view, they can make better decisions before cost, risk, and service trade-offs are locked in.
Tariff exposure is becoming a bigger margin issue: The average effective tariff rate was about 2.2 percent in 2024,1 before the current wave of tariff measures. By February 2026, announced tariff rates had reached about 17 percent,2 underscoring how quickly tariff exposure can change landed cost assumptions.
Landed cost visibility is the ability to see the full cost, risk, and operational impact of moving goods early enough to shape business decisions. That view can include freight, duties, tariffs, taxes, insurance, compliance requirements, and finance implications.
The value at stake across landed cost is already visible. Logistics and transportation costs were cited as the top source of value leakage in a recent KPMG survey of 462 US supply chain leaders,3 followed closely by inefficient sourcing and suboptimal supplier terms.
That pairing is important because landed cost depends on both sides of the equation. A transportation decision may look efficient until its effect on customer commitments, working capital, or trade compliance comes into view. Meanwhile, a sourcing decision may look attractive until logistics costs, tariff exposure, duty treatment, or compliance requirements change the economics.
Leaders are responding to that complexity with a broad transformation agenda. Nearly three-quarters of the respondents in our survey are planning a comprehensive transformation of their supply chain operating model within the next three years, up from 62 percent last year1. The increase points to a growing recognition that operations need to keep pace with a more volatile environment: the rising pressures—from tariffs, geopolitics, weather, suppliers, transportation, and customers—can all change cost and risk quickly.
The tariff response is just one example of what can happen when visibility lags the pressure. Six in 10 of the surveyed leaders said they are passing tariff-driven costs directly to customers through price increases, and 53 percent are implementing surcharges or tariff recovery fees—while far fewer are reengineering the cost itself through supplier diversification or network reconfiguration1. Pass-through is a rational short-term response. But it’s also a signal that many organizations can’t see landed cost clearly enough to optimize it.
Another challenge for many companies is they must manage these pressures across fragmented operating models, in real time. Companies that have grown through acquisitions may be working across multiple ERPs, transportation systems, data models, and process definitions—leaving teams across functions with different views of cost, risk, and timing. Tariff actions can change the course of existing decisions already in motion, while uncertainty about how certain duties may be applied can require continuous monitoring.
The blind spots extend beyond the enterprise, too. Timely updates to customs broker and freight forwarder instructions can make the difference between tying up significant cash in amended filings with US Customs and Border Protection and preserving that cash for higher-value business needs.
What the data says: Risk management and resilience ranked as the top transformation priority for supply chain leaders, with supply chain visibility (44 percent) and inventory management (42 percent) topping their list for planned near-term system and technology investments.1
The clearest value comes from the places where global trade, transportation, and finance decisions meet.
Transportation teams have traditionally focused on movement: mode, carrier, cost, service, visibility, and execution. Global trade teams have focused on product classification, country of origin, tariff rates and rules, free trade agreements, export controls, forced-labor risks, and audit readiness. Finance has managed the downstream effects through accruals, payments, reconciliation, working capital, and potential duty or tariff recoveries.
Those responsibilities are still distinct, but the opportunity is to connect the decisions behind them.
When global trade and transportation data work together, leaders can evaluate whether a sourcing choice is still attractive after duty and freight are considered. They can understand whether a shipment should move before a compliance requirement, license, or import/export restriction is cleared. They can compare routing options with both cost and service impact in view. They can also give finance earlier visibility into the cash and margin implications of decisions that may otherwise surface later in the process.
Several capabilities become more powerful when these different functions are connected:
Together, these capabilities are a force multiplier: They move leaders from functional optimization to enterprise-level insight into how each decision changes the cost, risk, and service equation before commitments are made.
Assess your organization’s ability to connect global trade, transportation, and landed cost data to improve visibility, manage costs, and support more informed supply chain decisions.
Landed cost visibility becomes useful when leaders can act on it. That requires a practical operating model that connects data, workflows, decision rights, and accountability around the outcomes the business needs to improve.
The work should start with the decisions that matter most. For one company, that may mean understanding whether sourcing from a new country will still make sense after tariff modeling, logistics costs, and service requirements are considered. For another, it may mean knowing when to expedite a shipment, when to hold it for compliance review, or when to update a customer promise before cost and service issues escalate.
From there, leaders can map the data and workflow dependencies behind those decisions. Product, supplier, carrier, customer, classification, tariff, lane, cost, and finance data all need clear ownership. The same is true for the rules that govern when a shipment can move, when an exception should escalate, and how trade-offs should be made.
Governance is especially important because landed cost sits across functions. Supply chain, logistics, global trade, procurement, finance, IT, and operations teams may each own part of the answer. Without clear decision rights, teams can continue optimizing within their own domains while the enterprise absorbs the cost of misalignment.
Technology can help, especially when organizations already have relevant capabilities in their ERP, transportation management, global trade management, carrier, or analytics environments. But the value depends on how those tools are configured, connected, governed, and adopted. Better use of existing capabilities may create value quickly. Larger gaps may require broader process redesign, data cleanup, integration work, or platform modernization.
Advanced analytics, automation, and AI-enabled capabilities can also support the model. They can help teams identify landed-cost patterns, detect exceptions, model scenarios, find duty recovery opportunities, and prioritize actions. Their impact depends on the same foundations that make landed cost visibility useful: reliable data, clear rules, connected workflows, and teams able to act on the output.
The US tariff policy has changed more than 50 times since January 2025, according to one analysis.4 For many companies, that pace of change requires faster analysis of import data by supplier, country, product, and lane. That analysis can help leaders understand exposure, evaluate mitigation options, and create a clearer record for finance, compliance, and executive decision-making. It can also support:
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Leaders can start by identifying where landed cost visibility is breaking down today and where better decisions would create the most value. The first step should be practical and outcome-based, with a focused visibility assessment that can help leaders answer four questions that will guide their efforts:
Those questions turn landed cost visibility from a broad ambition into a sequence of practical decisions. Leaders can identify which visibility gaps are creating the greatest drag on cost, compliance, working capital, and customer performance; which fixes can create value quickly; and which foundational changes need a broader roadmap.
1. Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Marina Azzimonti at al, “Tariffs: Estimating the Economic Impact of the 2025 Measures and Proposals,” April 2025.
2. Financial Times, “Trump tariff tracker: US trade, markets and the economy,” accessed August 2026.
3. KPMG LLP. “The State of Next-Gen Supply Chain: A Leadership Survey,” March 2026.
4. Tax Foundation, Erica York and Alex Durante, “Trump Tariffs: Tracking the Economic Impact of the Trump Trade War,” accessed August 2026.
KPMG LLP (KPMG) helps organizations assess landed cost visibility across trade compliance, transportation management, ERP, finance, procurement, and operations. We work with leaders to identify where disconnected data, workflows, or decision rights may be limiting performance—and build practical roadmaps tied to business value.
Depending on the organization’s needs, KPMG professionals can help evaluate current-state processes, quantify value opportunities, improve data and governance, assess existing technology capabilities, and prioritize improvements across quick wins, foundational fixes, and longer-term modernization.
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