Harry Moser: The 9-Step Roadmap to Reshoring Success
In his October 8, 2026 IndustryWeek column, Harry Moser, founder of the Reshoring Initiative, lays out a nine-step framework for manufacturers deciding what to bring back and how to make it stick. His starting point is a change in the question itself: stop asking where labor is cheapest and start asking where total profitability is highest. Many offshore decisions, he argues, were made and are still being made on incomplete cost models.
The nine steps, in brief:
- Identify imported products with problems or risks. Ask the people who live with them: long supply chains, excess inventory, emergency air freight, stockouts, quality and warranty issues, delayed launches, IP exposure, frequent engineering changes.
- Use total cost of ownership (TCO) to evaluate them, starting with products whose ex-works offshore price is up to about 30% lower.
- If TCO is within about 10%, evaluate automation to close the gap, and calculate the ROI against TCO rather than price.
- Align the workforce with operational changes.
- Develop a future-ready workforce, including capturing the knowledge of retiring employees.
- Build a skilled workforce pipeline to recruit, attract and retain workers.
- Help your customers decide to reshore, using TCO to show B2B customers the case for ordering from you what they had offshored.
- Tie it together with leanshoring, applying lean and continuous improvement so domestic production stays competitive.
- Publicize your reshoring successes.
Why it is worth reading: it is a practical sequence rather than a policy argument, and it is built on numbers. Moser reports that in 190 China-versus-U.S. sourcing cases the Reshoring Initiative analyzed, the U.S. won 8% of the time on price alone, 32% of the time on TCO, and 46% of the time on TCO with a 15% tariff added. He also cites the Initiative's 2025 survey finding that only about 39% of OEMs use TCO, and that a skilled workforce was the top constraint on reshoring. One worked example: Morey Corp, an Illinois electronics manufacturer, moved diecast aluminum housing sourcing from China to Illinois and cut inventory by 94%.