Bob Kill is president and CEO of Enterprise Minnesota.

For manufacturers that watched their businesses decline as original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) opted to transfer their supplier relationships to cheap-labor countries such as China and India, there is now solid evidence that those contracts are coming back home. Some solid advice to go with this: It will pay to get ready.

I’ve heard repeatedly from manufacturers that offshoring is quickly, even dramatically, losing its appeal for OEMs. Gone are the extraordinarily inexpensive costs of overseas labor paired with favorable exchange rates that made hiring foreign suppliers a no-brainer.

Sean Mowry, left, president of Metal Craft, talks about strategic opportunities with Bob Kill, president of Enterprise Minnesota

Other issues have cropped up for the offshoring OEM set as well: Product quality is sometimes suspect, intellectual property frequently lacks legal safeguards, and linguistic and cultural barriers often complicate training workers overseas. There are also frustrating lags in turnaround time.

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