I had a chance to meet Harry Moser, founder of the Reshoring Initiative, at the recent ISM2015 conference and we talked about the library of articles that is housed on the Initiative’s website. For anyone doing research on reshoring topics and issues, this is a must use resource! The reshoring data that is added to each article is what gives this resource muscle and it is truly impressive. First of all, it is important to recognize the mission of the Initiative: “The mission of the Reshoring Initiative is to bring good, well-paying manufacturing jobs back to the United States by assisting companies to more accurately assess their total cost of offshoring, and shift collective thinking from offshoring is cheaper to local reduces the total cost of ownership” (website).
On the website, the Library option can be selected directly from the navigation bar. There are currently over 2280 articles in the library. The initial default sort view is by date, most recent first, which is nice because you can see how often the articles get updated right off the bat. The results view helpfully shows the title of the article, the source, the company involved, and the full date. The default search option allows you to type in “your keyword, name or anything…” in the search bar provided. For more targeted searching, select the Advanced search option. Here you can type in Company/Division or parent name, in addition to using in a combination format, these various options provided by drop down menus: Type of work, Reshoring category, Country from which reshored, US region reshored to, Industry, What non-domestic negative factor made offshoring less attractive?, What domestic positive factor made reshoring more attractive?, and a date filter. The options for “What non-domestic negative factors made offshoring less attractive” include over 25 factors such as Burden on staff, Travel/cost time, Onsite audit cost, Green considerations, Product liability and Regulatory compliance.
Doing a search by only selecting Florida from the dropdown menu for “US region reshored to,” produced forty articles found from sources such as Pensacola News Journal, Trade and Industry Development, Precision Metals Industries, Panama City News Herald, WPTV West Palm Beach News 5, NBC News, Florida Trend, Governor of Florida’s Office, China Daily, and others.
Going into the record of one of the articles took me to the page with the “additional reshoring information” (mentioned in the above paragraph). Here is the data provided for this article: Company/Division name; Type of Work; If manufacturing, is the company an OEM?; Reshoring Category; Total number of jobs (added or to be added); Year reshoring announced; Year reshoring implemented or to be implemented; Domestically, the work will be done (i.e. in-house); Capital investment ($); City reshored to; State(s) reshored to; If relevant, work nearshored to; Industry(ies); Product(s) reshored; and What domestic positive factors made reshoring more attractive? Also provided is a link to the full text of the article.
In addition to the Library, there are many other resources of value on the website. The Resources section provides links to Case Studies, Webinars, Presentations, Programs, Videos, and Reports. The News/Events section provides access to news, upcoming events, a blog, and eNewsletter. There is also The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Estimator, which is “a free online tool that helps companies account for all relevant factors — overhead, balance sheet, risks, corporate strategy and other external and internal business considerations — to determine the true total cost of ownership.”
