To remain competitive, your factory will have to invest to increase profits or reduce costs. As production levels reach a peak or sales remain stagnant, a decision will have to be made as to whether to move operations overseas to take advantage of low-cost labor or invest in existing facilities to reduce costs and increase return on investments. In short, you will have to look at the benefits of offshoring vs. automation.
Save Your Factory is dedicated to providing resources to companies interested in moving off shore and offering real alternatives, such as automation and streamlining principles to increase productivity. Many companies who see the benefits of offshoring do not explore these alternatives or fully investigate the hidden costs of outsourced manufacturing. Save Your Factory offers white papers, articles, video testimonials, and interactive tools to help factories explore the benefits to automation and the pitfalls of offshore manufacturing.
Our industrial automation case studies offer examples of real companies facing similar challenges as you and found that the results of investing in industrial robotic automation reduced their costs per piece to be below their Chinese competitors. Other companies have found that the hidden cost of outsourcing to China had risks that were not fully considered. Our research has found a number of companies that had lost proprietary information due to unenforceable intellectual property laws and partnering companies that were blatantly counterfeiting North American products.
Choosing to invest in automation greatly increased the flexibility of their factories. This was important to quickly respond to an ever changing market. By automating, North American factories found that design changes could be efficiently made, product upgrades could occur with minimal time-to-market, and packaging changes could happen to take advantage of new campaigns, different product features, and new market opportunities. Despite low-labor costs, offshoring simply cannot compete with the flexibility of American factories. It takes four to six weeks to ship final products from China to the United States, not including the amount of time these shipments set at docks waiting for transport or inspection.
Save Your Factory understands that moving to China is a viable and profitable solution for many companies looking to gain access in that market. However, factories do not always explore alternatives to outsourcing or research the hidden costs of moving operations overseas. We offer our resources to you so you can objectively analyze outsourcing vs automation.
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