Outsourcing/Offshoring Insights

The last decades have seen manufacturing and services offshored from industrialized countries to low labor cost regions like Asia. These geographic locational decisions were often made based on low price and ignored other important criteria such as additional cost measures and risk in the decision-making process. Because of increasing wages in typical low cost countries and other added complexity such as economic and supply chain risk, many well-known global organizations as well as smaller companies are re-evaluating their supply chain designs. Also, continuously rising automation and robotization ("Internet of Things") with low or even without human intervention in industrialized countries is driving many organizations to re-evaluate their "shoring" decisions from both a manufacturing and a supply perspective. Re-evaluations of "shoring" decisions inherently create a need to re-examine theoretical and academic contributions to this rapidly changing phenomenon. As editors, the intent of this ebook was to nurture and develop manuscripts that add to the exciting and dynamic body of knowledge on "rightshoring."