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This article evaluates and discusses the trend towards insourcing of production that has been proposed in the media and in a few recent studies. The article sets the context of this trend, defining and relating key terms such as outsourcing and insourcing. Based on a large-scale survey conducted in Denmark, we provide empirical results focussing on the extent to which Danish manufacturing companies have outsourced and insourced and the extent of and reasons for outsourcing and insourcing from and to Denmark. The results show that although many companies have considered returning activities to Danish shores relatively few have actually taken such action. The article contributes large-scale empirical data from firms of different sizes and discusses whether or not the trend towards global and low-cost country sourcing is likely to see a reversal to local sourcing

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Performance outcomes of offshoring, backshoring and staying at home manufacturingThe objective of this paper is to advance the understanding of performance outcome of companies pursuing different strategies of moving manufacturing abroad and moving it back again. The paper is based on a large-scale questionnaire-survey of perceptual data from 233 useable respondents, from senior managers in manufacturing companies. Furthermore, secondary performance data of return on capital employed is included in the analysis. Companies that have an explicit corporate manufacturing strategy report better operational performance in terms of product quality, lead time and flexibility than companies that do not have such a strategy. Data does not reveal any differences in productivity among companies that have offshored, backshored or maintained manufacturing at home. Companies that have offshored manufacturing report lower unit costs than companies that have applied a staying at home strategy. In contrast, no significant level of difference in unit costs could be found when comparing companies that have backshored manufacturing with companies that have maintained manufacturing at home. Companies that have offshored manufacturing further report that they to a higher degree can extract detailed component, product and process data from their cost-accounting systems. The paper stresses the importance of being conscious, both of access to and quality of cost-accounting data, when making informed, strategic manufacturing decisions, and on how such decisions might affect both operational and cost performance. The paper provides novel empirical insights on cost performance, operational performance and cost accounting data among manufacturers pursuing different strategies of moving manufacturing abroad and back to home destinations.