As it turns out, it depends. Offshoring is not a simple enterprise. For one, due to language and other issues, when stuff is offshored it requires very close supervision. I have worked for several companies that had stuff offshored and it never was very simple. An amusing case was when I worked for a Japanese company. They had stuff assembled in China and it was always a headache. The worse was when a whole batch of product was assembled with some electrolytic capacitors in the power supply put in backwards. Their testing consisted of plugging it in and turning it on long enough to see it go through its power up routine. The problem was that wasn't long enough for the capacitors to fail. So we had a warehouse full of the things before we got reports of in the field failures. So pallets had to be taken down, cases opened, the items removed from their boxes, the items opened, the capacitors located, a determination made whether or not the capacitors were in backwards and if so, unsoldered, fixed and repacked. Not much money saved there, I tell you. That sort of thing was common, so common that they started reshoring product. Because that wasn't the only time. And then there are shipping costs. Which is why there is a trend of reshoring for American companies.
To no ones great surprise, offshoring only really works for some products. But, big bonuses are/were paid and no one actually suffers for dumb decisions in American boardrooms. |
