KILDEER, Ill.—Are you a manufacturer of rubber products or anything else, wondering if it makes sense to bring some of your offshore production back to the U.S.?
If so, Harry Moser and the Reshoring Initiative are ready to help you decide.
Moser founded the Reshoring Initiative in the Chicago suburb of Kildeer in 2010. On the organization's website, Moser describes it as “an industry-led effort to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States.”
The Reshoring Initiative helps U.S. manufacturers figure all the costs of moving production offshore—something, according to Moser, they don't often do.
“Our purpose is to get companies to re-evaluate offshoring,” he said. “Does it make sense or doesn't it?'
On its website, the Reshoring Initiative offers online tools to help U.S. manufacturers and suppliers calculate the total cost of ownership of both offshoring and reshoring.
Those tools include:
* The Reshoring Library, an online database that catalogs nearly 300 articles about examples of reshoring, sorted by state, country, industry and reason for reshoring;
* The Reshoring Case Studies Template, through which manufacturers, technology suppliers and distributors easily can report cases of reshoring for the library; and
* The TCO Estimator, an intuitive online calculator for determining a company's profit and loss impact under both offshoring and reshoring.
The tools are free, and no one pays to use the website or any of its features. Although Moser has acted as a paid consultant to a few corporations, the Reshoring Initiative is paid for by 38 sponsors, he said. These sponsors include trade associations, economic development organizations and manufacturers of capital equipment and cutting tools, he said.