A Design Alternative to Offshoring

Yes they saved 10% at the cost of quality.

I can't recall where I read this, but I did see that many companies rush into offshore manufacturing only to find they didn't really save anything. But it has been an MBA mantra that offshore is cheaper, so insufficient analysis is done prior to the planning. Once the management decision is made and planning starts, it is often (for ego reasons) to get the decision reversed.

There was a time 30 or 40 years ago when such moves were nearly automatic savings, but those times are long past. It's our thinking that hasn't gotten up to date.

Have you considered that there's a political component of "off-shoring"? Globalists know they cannot subjugate the earth with a Soviet-style World Socialism out of the U.N.(Moscow/Peiping), UNTIL the USA has definitively fallen, even though we are well on our way, PINNED, as we are, to Political correctness under the Aegis of Islam, the Globalist's "Point-of-the-spear" of a religion WITH COVERT FASCISM, which is why it persists in dismantling ALL other religions which might give the opposition "heart" to oppose Islamization. Once it is determined that the USA has reached the "rotton-fruit" stage, THEN many companies will, to their chagrin, find out that they don't "own" their literally "China-bound" subsideries, at all, after all, which would have made moving to China as expensive as moving to the Moon! Hopefully, Red China will itself collapse-in on itself, after a series of "bubble-collapses", before they can then Off-shore their voluminous youthful and tech-heavy Armies, to our coasts and interiors--Oh, just to "visit", no doubt, or to help us "restore" our mysteriously collapsed energy-grid, leading to our occupation for oh, a thousand years or so.

We assume that companies outsource to offshore manufacturing plants because of the bottom line. But what does that really mean?

What might work for the bottom line today might not tomorrow, and putting an offshore facility there can involve a substantial commitment.

I think offshoring involves some crystal ball gazing on the part of corporate planners. And it might also involve pressures they feel that they aren't telling us about.

If design changes can reduce the immediate financial advantage of offshoring to near zero, why bother? And this takes us beyond simple questions of cost and quality to deeper questions involving economic, political, and social trends.

For example, Ford wants to put a plant in India because they see a substantial market opening up in South Asia. Other companies could have similar ideas in mind. Maybe they are trying to think ahead.

But that doesn't mean I agree with offshoring. I just think we might need to dig deeper to understand all the reasons why it is happening. What is really driving the trend towards globalization? And who is really benefiting from it?

I would think that local capital invested locally would always be the sanest economic pattern. Because it aligns best with other goals - social and cultural goals. For local capital to flee local investment opportunities is a bad sign. It has been blamed on local regulatory environments, etc. But I see a kind of blind greed behind it that points to less rational motivations. I see in globalization, shadows of a sort of neo-colonialism. Those past experiments did not really turn out that well. In each case, the locals finally got tired of being stolen from and told what to do by offshore capital and revolted. The US is a prime example of that. So, what would drive capital to try that old trick again? In light of history it seems sort of stupid.