As this is written (April 5, 2025), company managers and executives, in the United States and elsewhere, are struggling to determine how to deal with newly-announced, unexpectedly-high tariffs on goods imported to the U.S. from abroad. Across-the-board tariffs of 10% have just gone into effect, and much higher tariffs on imports from China, Europe and other countries are scheduled to go into effect within days.
Moreover, China and Canada have each announced retaliatory tariffs on goods imported from the United States. Companies everywhere are in "emergency planning mode", as their supplier cost assumptions and manufacturing plans, and their pricing and sales forecasts have been upended. What to do?
Time to Ask "What If" - and Apply Analytics
Our take: You need to decide and move quickly, and your supply chain and logistics systems might not be capable of moving that quickly, giving you the answers you need, or dealing with the high levels of uncertainty you're now facing. This might be a very good time to whip up a traditional spreadsheet in Excel, and start exploring "what-if" scenarios.
It can really help to build a model of current reality, then change a few numbers and recalculate in Excel. But you can do much better, with our Analytic Solver add-in for Excel: It brings the full power of prescriptive analytics and decision intelligence into your spreadsheet model.
You can use the best analytics methods available anywhere to analyze supplies, costs, production and distribution, and do it quickly in Excel. If your material costs are suddenly much higher from country X, but you have limited substitute material available from country Y, you can quickly express those conditions in your model, and let Analytic Solver find new, optimal choices for your supply. Watch the brief video below to see what we mean:
But What If Tariff Rates Change Tomorrow?
Today managers are facing the highest levels of uncertainty and risk in many years about import costs, commodity prices, exchange rates, interest rates and more. How can you possibly make plans that are robust enough to deal with all this uncertainty?
Yes, you can even do this in Excel -- a unique strength of Analytic Solver, our Excel add-in, not found in most other software, is its ability to model uncertainty, and find optimal ways to allocate resources in the presence of uncertainty. It includes powerful tools for both risk analysis and simulation, and mathematical optimization -- and it does more: It makes the use of stochastic optimization easy in Excel.
Can You "Wait and See"?
Most optimization tools can only solve for simple decisions made today -- the optimal values of "decision variables". But not all decisions must be made, or should be made today. In Analytic Solver, you can define both decisions that must be made "here and now", and also decisions that can be made on a "wait and see" basis, when a key uncertainty is resolved. Nothing could be more appropriate -- or more valuable -- today! To do this, you'll need to learn a few concepts -- but these are all explained in our next video:
If this is intriguing -- and you feel comfortable building models in Excel -- you can start right now: Just click here to download the SolverSetup program, and run it to install Analytic Solver. Then start Excel, click the Analytic Solver tab on the Ribbon, and fill out the short form to register and start a free trial. We highly recommend that you choose Help - Example Models from the Ribbon -- you'll see almost 120 example models, including the stochastic optimization example in the video above (and more). If as a manager you face the problem, but you're not the modeler, just send the right person to this page.
In every problem there is opportunity. This is a BIG problem for many of us -- but for those with the right attitude and the right tools, it can be a BIG opportunity!