COMMENT
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Andrew Allcock, Editor
Reshoring 4.0
The response by the UK’s manufacturing SMEs and their
representative bodies, the High Value Manufacturing Catapult and
some of the country’s most prominent OEMs to the need for medical
ventilators has shown what is possible within these shores. Not just
to those who already knew that we have what has become a hidden,
below-the-radar engineering capability spread across thousands of
SMEs, but government and the general population have seen it, too. Everybody knows
what supply chain disruption looks like – no toilet rolls on the shelves at a banal but
everyday level, plus the real possibility that getting sick might see this rich country
unable to save some of its people. Italy showed us what that looks like.
Buying from abroad proved insufficient to deal with the equipment need, both for
ventilators and PPE, as the duff medical devices from China and useless kit from
Turkey demonstrated rather well. Lest that seem unduly harsh on those two countries,
perhaps this was a problem of unprofessional procurement: we might not have asked
the right questions or performed due diligence.
In Machinery’s May-June issue (p7, www.is.gd/juyome ), we covered in detail the
bustle of activity that saw the country’s manufacturing sector pull together, leaning
heavily for our coverage on LinkedIn. Often to be seen in the comments associated with
the messages were hopes that this effort would open OEMs’ eyes and prompt some
reshoring. Of course, there are already stories of reshoring; Machinery receives and
publishes them when they turn up, but we are talking about a much broader, deeper,
sustained effort.
This hope of reshoring is not a new one, but after two decades or more of a strategy
of outsourcing to low-cost countries, much of it to China, we have arrived at the Covid-
19 pandemic and the need for a great national manufacturing effort to compensate for
the negative effect of extended supply chains.
We had already seen some global disruption before this, of course, with the great
unpronounceable Icelandic volcano ash party of 2010 (Eyjafjallajökull, if you want to
try). But we have seen it much worse this time. And according to the World Economic
Forum (WEF), there are a growing number of epidemic events, amounting to
approximately 200 annually. Ironically, in October last year, WEF-driven Event 201
( www.is.gd/ixoxak ) modelled a pandemic. We all now know it is very real and,
importantly, the geopolitics of the day are now very different to 20+ years ago, as is the
technology available to us to improve our national performance – automation,
connectivity, AI, data, Industry 4.0 etc.
So, is it different this time? Yes, but reshoring at large will still require organisation,
focus and support to make it significantly real. (Read our feature on p10) ■
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www.machinery.co.uk | MachineryMagazine | @MachineryTweets | September 2020 7
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