Reshoring

Manufacturing is Coming Home - Lean

By: Ade Asefeso MCIPS MBA

Narrated by: Pete Ferrand

Reshoring is essentially the opposite of offshoring, it is a term used to describe the act of bringing back offshored manufacturing to a country. In the beginning of 2011, for the most part, most people thought that this was just impossible, that there would be no reshoring to the U.S. or UK, that everything was going to China, manufacturing was leaving both countries and it will never come back and I think the striking thing is how much that’s changed in the last three years. You went to China because it was just so cheap you couldn’t help it; but if you’ve got the engineers and people in the U.S. or UK, and the customer base in the U.S. or UK, you’d like to be close to the customer. It gives you a shorter supply chain.

©2014 Ade Asefeso MCIPS MBA (P)2014 Ade Asefeso MCIPS MBA

Likely true at the time but now events have chnged

What made the experience of listening to Reshoring the most enjoyable?

The narratory along with the POV that reshoring was happening.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Reshoring?

That although business was returning, it was not creating all that many jobs. Automation pretty much killed the old jobs.

What does Pete Ferrand bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

His reading style and voice are easy to listen to.

Any additional comments?

Book now a bit dated. Current events are conspiring to completely change the situation as the president negotiates trade deals around the world.

Very biased one sided discussion of obvious pros/cons of offshoring

The author is EXTREMELY BIASED. You can feel it almost from the first minute. He compares offshoring to 7 sins! And you can feel how he hates China. He probably had some negative experience working with China, but that shouldn't be an excuse. All the time he talks about China and how bad and silly it is to move manufacturing there. I listened to a half of the book and he just mention some other Asian countries (Taiwan and Vietnam, but didn't mention India, for example).

Throughout the book the author is basically discussing advantages and disadvantages of offshoring. All that discussion could be fit into 5 minutes or 1 page. In addition to that he introduces some facts that are not supported with any research data, for example he claims that the productivity of a US worker is higher than that of a Chinese worker.