What would this do to China? It seems that its been proven again and again not to doubt the economic engine of US and how technology pushes things.
Technology synergy may finally arrive. Could 2010-2020 be the new industrial age where manufacturing changes?
“The way we see it,” says Moser, “about 60 percent of the companies that offshored manufacturing didn’t really do the math. They looked only at the labor rate—they didn’t look at the hidden costs.” Moser believes that about a quarter of what’s made outside the U.S. could be more profitably made at home.
“There was a herd mentality to the offshoring,” says John Shook, a manufacturing expert and the CEO of the Lean Enterprise Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “And there was some bullshit. But it was also the inability to see the total costs—the engineers in the U.S. and factory managers in China who can’t talk to each other; the management hours and money flying to Asia to find out why the quality they wanted wasn’t being delivered. The cost of all that is huge.”
But many of those hidden costs come later. In the first blush of cheap manufacturing, it’s easy to overlook the slow loss of your own skills, the gradual homogenization of your products, the corrosion of quality and decline of innovation. And it’s easy to assume that globally distributed production will hum along more smoothly than it often does in practice: however strong the planning, some of those shipping containers will be opened to reveal damaged or substandard goods, and some of them won’t have the number or variety of goods a company needs at that very moment. “All you need is to have to hire one or two 747s a couple times to get product here in a hurry,” says Shook, “and you lose those savings.”
Thomas Mayor, a senior adviser with Booz & Company who specializes in manufacturing strategy, says that in industry after industry, he is seeing the same kind of reassessment GE has made. When asked about the value of the original rush offshore, Mayor laughs.
[Read more | The insourcing Boom | the Atlantic]
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