Do Industry 4.0 Technologies Matter When Companies Backshore Manufacturing Activities? An Explorative Study Comparing Europe and the US

A multi-theory framework for understanding the reshoring decision

“…From a practice perspective, the European Reshoring Monitor (2019), for example, reported on 250 cases of reshoring over 4 years (2014)(2015)(2016)(2017)(2018), and in 2018 the number of US companies reporting new reshoring was at its highest level in recorded history (Moser, 2019). More recently, beyond more typical competitiveness aspects, the potential of sustainability to drive additional reshoring has been emphasized (Fratocchi and Di Stefano, 2020;Reshoring Institute, 2020), a trend which began a few years ago (Ashby, Leat & Hudson-Smith, 2012). Moreover, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the benefits of shortened supply chains with production located close to markets has become a strategic imperative for improving supply chain resilience (Gereffi, 2020;Seric and Winkler, 2020;Strange, 2020).…”

“…Whilst the Internet and other technological advances have been important drivers of offshoring as they have reduced transaction costs (Jahns et al, 2006), current digitization and industry 4.0 developments have been also spurring reshoring (Bals et al, 2015;Dachs and Seric, 2019;Fratocchi and Di Stefano, 2020). For physical production processes, additive manufacturing such as 3D printing, and the advancement of cyber-physical systems have been important developments related to innovative production processes (Fratocchi, 2018).…”

Post-offshoring manufacturing strategies: decision-making and implementation

“…We also included firms belonging to industrial clusters; this can be relevant for manufacturing firms, as belonging to an industrial cluster may affect post-offshoring decision-making due to specificities in terms of competences and industrial commons (Capasso and Morrison, 2013;De Marchi et al, 2017;Pisano and Shih, 2012a). By contacting business associations, leveraging previous findings of the research group (Bettiol et al, 2019) [1] and considering evidence collected in the UnivAQ Manufacturing Reshoring Dataset (Ancarani et al, 2015;Fratocchi and Di Stefano, 2020), we identified and collected interviews from 11 companies. Those companies are part of a wider (14 case studies) research project conducted by the authors (Bettiol et al (2019)) to investigate post-offshoring strategies implemented by manufacturing companies and the relative decision-making and implementation processes.…”

“…Based on the extant reshoring literature, it seems useful to integrate the six factors identified by the Boffelli and Johansson (2020) framework with a further factor, namely enabling factors. Among others, scholars identified national (Elia et al, 2021) and regional policies (Pegoraro et al, 2022), Industry 4.0 technologies (Barbieri et al, 2022;Fratocchi and Di Stefano, 2020) and sustainability issues (Fratocchi and Di Stefano, 2019;Fratocchi and Majer, 2023) as enablers of post-offshoring strategies. With respect to the dichotomy proposed by Boffelli and Johansson (2020), we include enabling factors in the decision-making phase, being counterparts of barriers.…”

“…The new technological paradigm of Industry 4.0 seems to change this scenario and represents an incentive to invest in the home country. As the literature has pointed out (Ancarani et al, 2019;Dachs et al, 2019;Fratocchi and Di Stefano, 2020;Gupta et al, 2023;Stentoft and Rajkumar, 2020;Strange and Zucchella, 2017;Sturgeon, 2019), Industry 4.0 promises to combine high product customization with production at scale, reducing the usual trade-off between quality and quantity. Interviewed companies seem to have become aware of this new scenario and are therefore more likely to reconsider the possibility of investing in their home country by upgrading the technology of production to Industry 4.0.…”