A manufacturing boom from reversing outsourcing?

[AndromedaPatFan]

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...boom/309166/1/

That's the thesis of the article, with GE's appliance business as an example. Core reasons include:

• Overseas labor isn't as cheap as it used to be.
• US labor isn't as expensive as it used to be.
• Energy costs of transportation from overseas are high.
• Energy costs of manufacturing may be low in the US, due to the natural gas boom.
• The quality and design advantages of manufacturing locally are non-trivial ...
• ... and they're concentrated earlier in product cycles -- but, due to technology, ...
• ... product cycles are getting shorter.

[PatsFan2003]

A lot of companies found out they were in a sense losing their intellectual capital if the work was being done elsewhere. The company I worked for backsourced most (but not all of course) of it's software development back to the states.

[ForWhoForWhat?]

Good.

[AndromedaPatFan]

Quality of outsourced work in some cases is also down. I know an Indian firm that actually developed companies' products for them, with great success. Then the quality of their work went down. Part was putting the wrong guy in charge of a big division, I conjecture, but a lot is much higher competition inside India for the best engineers.

[Raid]

Back in the day when Taiwan was doing mucho manufacturing for US companies, their own quality of life rose, salaries rose... to the point where THEY started outsourcing to Malaysia and Indonesia. The 'further' US companies spread their supply chain they started to run into transporation cost issues, some quality issues as they didn't have as many on site corporate monitors/managers and real problems in TIME issues when they had to put in a patch/rework/etc... as product was on a train in the US from Cali, on a ship in the Pacific, or somewhere in..... Tailand for example. So inventories go out of control and customers are scratchin' their head as to 'where's my product'?