Is This A Resurgence In Status For Nearshoring?

New data published this month in Logistics Manager magazine has indicated that nearshoring is a strategy that is gaining in popularity – particularly in Europe. In their data, 56% of respondents indicate that they favour “rightshoring” over offshoring to the lowest possible cost location.

The Logistics Manager data is focused mainly on manufacturing businesses ensuring that their manufacturing facilities are as close as possible to the end customers while also balancing production costs, but the strategy can be applied equally to other industries. The reason for this is that what is actually changing is the way we manage supply chains.

Any hand-off of a process between different departments, or from one company to another, takes time and involves risk. This is true of services and manufacturing. When a process is passed between teams internally there is a risk of failure during the transition. This risk is multiplied when offshore outsourcing means that a process has to be handed to another organisation in another location – often far away on a different time zone.

The traditional metrics that decided how to organise an outsourcing strategy focus on three areas; what is the cost? Can the quality be maintained or improved? Can the time required to deliver be reduced so factors such as time-to-market can be improved?

Nearshoring has always had an advantage over more general offshoring in all of these metrics, except for the cost. But with a renewed emphasis on the supply chain, it may well be that the correct focus is the quality of the team, or service, anyway.

Low cost services are no good to any company if they don’t work. Imagine a luxury goods retailer using the cheapest possible contact centre company for the customer service? How would that reflect on the brand? Likewise, an innovative drug company would not want the cheapest, least innovative, technology service. What companies really need when they outsource today is a partner.

Partnership is what sales teams used to talk about before the sale, but it’s become a reality because what has actually happened is that companies providing different services into a supply chain have really become a part of the team. Outsourcing has become a standard strategy and companies have got so good at doing it they slot in and work as if they were a part of the client.

This means that nearshoring – as opposed to focusing on the cost only and offshoring – takes on a renewed importance. If you want a better price for services, but not necessarily the lowest, because the quality and time factors are most important then European companies working with partners in Europe becomes the ideal business solution.

What has really happened as outsourcing has matured is that the boundary of the organisation has become flexible. Instead of thinking of the client with a supplier, it’s better to now just think of the client having flexible organisational boundaries that include some of their own team and some suppliers – but whoever actually does the work, they all exist within the organisational boundary of the client.

This is a big change and it certainly makes nearshoring an attractive option. Have you considered the differences between nearshoring and offshoring in the context of the way that company supply chains have changed in the past few years? Please do leave a comment with your own ideas here.