Industry Insight: The Nearshoring Wave is Coming—Are You Ready?
73% of US-based executives bringing work to USA
Long before political conversations about tariffs, COVID shocked the supply chain world and forced many US based manufacturers and assemblers to look for ways to reduce risk in their supply chain. Many explored dual-sourcing and re-shoring to supplier closer to home. The result is many US-based suppliers seeing a huge spike in demand and backlogs stretching out longer than 16 months. The winning US-based suppliers were typically are well positioned amongst their peer competition in terms technical capability, operations reliability and streamlined logistics. More on those in the coming articles of the HighMix Playbook.
The manufacturing landscape is shifting rapidly, with a growing trend toward nearshoring—relocating production closer to home. According to The Wall Street Journal, U.S. factories are experiencing a surge in demand from companies seeking local suppliers as they move operations out of Asia.
This is much welcomed opportunity for the US manufacturing sector as many small-medium businesses, particularly CNC machining shops as they excel at providing high quality of finish ready for final assembly operations in the US. This shifts the burden of sourcing raw and pre-finish materials on these suppliers, however this is a very manageable risk as local suppliers can be found for almost anything.
This trend is driving significant growth in U.S. manufacturing and opening new opportunities for CNC shops to win business from customers prioritizing local partnerships.
For today, here are a couple of tips focused on showcasing your level customer service to potential new customers. Be sure to subscribe to the newsletter if you'd like to see more content like this, topics for next HighMix Playbook:
Technical Capability : How to demonstrate it to new customers?
Operational Reliability: How to measure it for CNC shops?
Streamlined Logistics: Returnable shipping containers- what is the business case?
Two tips to win more customers looking for nearshoring suppliers
1. Differentiate by Offering Value-Added Services
Use your proximity to customers to offer unique benefits that offshore suppliers can’t match, such as:
Smaller batches to help clients reduce inventory-holding costs
Returnable shipping containers to eliminate packaging waste
Engineering support in the same time zone, making collaboration easier and faster.
2. Streamline Your New Customer Onboarding Process
New customer formulate their first impressions thru your marketing material (eg. website for most people), sales team communications and project scoping process. Welcome new customers with a clearly communicated process. Standardize how you gather requirements, communicate capabilities, and confirm timelines. This will help reduce delays and position your shop as a reliable partner for new clients.
Download the free checklist template here:
https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:va6c2:26178dc0-6f47-457c-b43f-1409d6efaf73
