Reshoring Extruded Parts Production to Strengthen Your Supply Chain

Posted on: June 10, 2021

During the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the many challenges that took manufacturers by surprise was the supply chain disruption it caused. According to Ernst & Young, 57% of companies reported serious disruptions, with 72% reporting a negative effect and companies in the automotive and industrial products sectors typically hit hardest.

With the supply chain disruptions so many manufacturers have experienced during the pandemic, more and more are turning to reshoring to more easily manage their supply chain while reducing risk, regaining stability, and creating greater long-term resilience.

The Reshoring Solution

Reshoring is one of the solutions many leaders from a variety of industries, both across the country and around the world, are leveraging to protect their supply chains. Also called onshoring, inshoring, or backshoring, reshoring is the opposite of offshoring—meaning a company is bringing production and manufacturing that was previously offshored to an overseas location back to the company’s country of origin.

Although relocating production may present some initial logistics and costs issues, reshoring enables a business to get ahead of supply chain disruptions (such as those they experienced in 2020 and 2021), and minimize the effects of negative events such as the pandemic.

Bringing Extruded Parts Production Back Home

Onshoring can provide significant production benefits that go beyond keeping links in the supply chain more localized. It also reduces strain on workflows, creating processes that are leaner and easier to manage, thanks to the relative proximity that bringing production back home provides.

More Nimble Design Modifications and R&D

With a local production partner who speaks the same language and has a facility that’s relatively nearby, instead of halfway around the world, communication is easier. Onsite visits aren’t as costly and time prohibitive. It’s easier and faster to relay change orders and modifications, making design and implementation that much more cost effective.

Quicker Turnaround Times

With shipping schedules and all the time spent on shipping logistics, products produced in offshore factories can take weeks and sometimes months to reach North America. Delays, such as those created by the Suez Canal logjam, often exacerbate the already-lengthy schedules. Localizing manufacturing through reshoring can eliminate much of that, allowing for more rapid output and delivery than is often possible with overseas production.

Reduced Shipping Expenses

Along with the faster turnaround times and more predictable schedules, if your product is intended for the domestic market, with a domestic production partner you won’t have the hefty transport costs and customs fees that come with having product shipped from overseas.

The Unexpected: Supply Chain Contingencies

Supply chains are already generally designed to be lean, so the buffer for that inventory is pretty thin for most manufacturers. Threats to supply chains can include anything from natural disasters (storms or earthquakes), man-made events (strikes, vandalism, or terrorist attacks), or even a once-in-a-lifetime event such as a global pandemic. Add to those risks a supply chain that’s stretched over long distances, and that supply chain becomes brittle.

Onshore production greatly reduces both that distance and the problems that accompany it. With the increased communication abilities, along with the nimbleness that can absorb sudden disruptions, your response times offer a distinct advantage with an onshore production partner.

Greater IP Security

It’s an unfortunate fact that many other countries do not have as strong, or as strongly enforced, intellectual property (IP) laws. Sending your product overseas for production can lead to your ideas and innovations being copied and put into use in other products without your permission or recompense—sometimes by production vendors who will even use your tooling and their substandard materials to create lower-quality knockoffs of your product. When manufacturing in the U.S., your intellectual property is protected by some of the strictest IP regulations in the world, substantially reducing your chances of suffering IP theft.

Custom Profiles is Your Domestic Extruded Parts Production Partner

Our team works with a wide range of high-quality engineering resins and general-purpose plastic material. We have the experience and expertise to handle nearly any plastic request. We can also discuss how we worked through the pandemic to continuously deliver high-quality products for our customers efficiently and on time, as well as how to produce your extruded plastic parts domestically to protect and stabilize your supply chain.

To partner with us and bring your plastic extrusion production back onshore from overseas, call us at 229-423-2929 or contact us online.

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