Consulting Firms Are Advising on Trade War Strategy—But Who’s Enabling the Execution?

Consulting Firms Are Advising on Trade War Strategy—But Who’s Enabling the Execution?

As global businesses scramble to adapt to a rapidly changing tariffs and trade landscape under President Trump’s second administration, one thing is clear: consulting firms are back in high demand.

From McKinsey and BCG to PwC, KPMG, and Sia Partners, firms are being called into boardrooms to deliver strategic guidance on tariffs, reshoring, supplier diversification, and cost mitigation. The advice is smart. The scenarios are well-framed. The stakes? Massive.

But there’s a growing gap between strategy and execution. You simply can’t spreadsheet your way through a trade war.

The Strategy Gap: Great Advice, No Execution Engine

It’s one thing to get advice on “what to consider.” It’s another to operationalize it across your supply chain fast enough to matter.

For many companies, the result is a familiar disconnect:

• Consulting firms recommend moving 30% of sourcing out of China.

• The planning team has no tools to model that impact in real time.

• Finance can’t quickly quantify the margin risk or working capital implications.

• Sales and ops aren’t looped in until after the fact.

• The supply chain team gets stuck trying to bridge the gap—manually.

This is not a knock-on consulting. Their strategic thinking is invaluable.

But in a world where geopolitical forces are changing overnight, you need both a playbook and a modern technolgy platform and that’s where ketteQ comes in.

Bridging Strategy and Action with Adaptive Planning

ketteQ is built to close the execution gap that so often follows great consulting advice.

We’ve partnered with firms like Genpact, Bristlecone, Plantensive, and Scott Sheldon to bring their strategic guidance to life with a platform that’s built for real-time decision-making and continuous adaptation.

How? By delivering a next generation of planning solutions that enables:

• Autonomous Scenario Modeling – Powered by our agentic AI solver, PolymatiQ™, ketteQ runs tens of thousands of what-if scenarios to instantly evaluate the impact of trade shifts, tariff changes, or sourcing moves.

• Cross-Functional Planning – Finance, supply chain, sales, and operations can align around a single planning engine with real-time visibility and shared assumptions.

• Rapid Replanning – As new data flows in—policy changes, supplier delays, demand shifts—ketteQ dynamically re-optimizes without requiring a full planning cycle restart.

• Execution-Ready Outputs – Unlike slide decks, ketteQ produces actual plan adjustments that drive procurement, logistics, inventory, and fulfillment decisions.

In short: consulting firms help you choose the right door. ketteQ helps you walk through it at the speed demanded by the frequency of today’s supply chain disruptions.

Real-World Example: Sourcing Strategy Under Pressure

One of our customers, a global consumer products manufacturer, received strategic recommendations to diversify away from a high-exposure China supplier base. The plan looked great on paper. But their legacy systems couldn’t simulate how that shift would affect transportation costs, warehouse capacity, or customer service levels.

With ketteQ, they didn’t have to guess. Our platform ran thousands of simulations across sourcing, inventory, and logistics—automatically identifying the most profitable and resilient path forward. Within days, they were executing on a strategy that would’ve taken months using traditional tools.

A Call to CIOs, COOs, and Consulting Partners

If you’re advising clients on supply chain strategy, make sure they’re equipped to act not just analyze.

If you’re a supply chain leader receiving world-class guidance but struggling to translate it into plans that stick, it’s time to upgrade the foundation.

Because in this era of continuous disruption, the winners won’t be those with the best advice—they’ll be the ones with the ability to turn advice into action in real time.

Learn how ketteQ works alongside your consulting partner: www.ketteq.com