Ultriva Director of Business Development Bill Swisher Discusses How He Has Viewed the Re-shoring Trend over the Course of his Career

I have been blessed to have worked for leaders in the manufacturing industry who have been dedicated to helping US manufacturing companies compete in the global marketplace. My introduction to this shared vision was in 1991 working for John Costanza, the "father of flow manufacturing" and founder of JCIT. John helped hundreds of companies transform from being schedule-based and forecast-driven to demand-driven with minimal working capital. Many of those companies were able to compete with their manufacturing based here in the United States, while their competetiors chased cheaper labor overseas.

Originally published on Manufacturing.net Wednesday, 04/10/2013 by Joel Hans, Managing Editor of Manufacturing.net

Ultriva founder and CEO, Narayan Laksham was interviewed by Joel Hans regarding barriers to American re-shoring.  Here's what Narayan had to say.

Starbucks has found a hit with their seasonal pumpkin spice lattes. I should know.  My discriminating and highly opinionated thirteen-year-old daughter Priscilla loves them. She likes the pumpkin spice lattes so much that she convinced a small platoon of girls to join her at the end of the first half day at the Starbucks just a short walk from their middle school.

In today’s environment streamlining the supply chain is a high priority for most manufacturing companies.  Purchased parts are typically 60% or more of the manufacturing cost.  This puts tremendous pressure on materials and supply chain executives to drive these costs down, while at the same time improve on-time delivery.  A proven approach to achieve those goals is to improve supply chain collaboration.

For many years, Information Technology (IT) executives in manufacturing firms have been looking to their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to help improve the operational and financial performance of their organizations.  And why not, they’ve spent hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on software licensing, a year or more implementing these systems and more than a few sleepless nights applying patches and updates from their ERP vendors.  However, most of their efforts have been disproportionately focused on back office processes due to the inherent shortcomings of ERP systems to address the business requirements of manufacturing processes inside the four walls of the plant.

What do distributed manufacturing, changing customer demand patterns, global supply chains, undesirable growth in inventory, and increasing pressure to reduce costs and improve profitability all have in common?   These are just a few of the challenges faced by today’s manufacturing executives.  Wouldn’t it be great if there was a system out there that could address each of the aforementioned challenges cost effectively and efficiently?  Well there is, it’s called a pull system (a.k.a. kanban) and it has been around for a long time.  Properly implemented, pull systems produce remarkable results.  So why isn’t pull more pervasive in manufacturing?  The simple reason is there have been more failures than successes.