Episode Details

Connect with Rosemary Coates:

Email: rcoates@ReshoringInstitute.org

Website: rcoates@ReshoringInstitute.org

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosemarycoates/

Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. My guest today is Rosemary Coates. Rosemary is the founder and executive director of the Reshoring Institute, a 501 C three nonprofit and nonpartisan organization focusing on expanding US manufacturing. She's also the President of Blue Silk Consulting, a supply chain management consulting firm.

Ms. Coates has been a management consultant for 30 plus years, helping global supply chain clients worldwide. In the early 2000s, she assisted many companies source products from China and set up operations there. But now helps companies with their global operation strategy by determining what products to manufacture in each market, including what can be manufactured in America. Rosemary, welcome to the show.

Rosemary Coates: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

Lisa Ryan: Absolutely. Would you please share with us a bit of your background and journey that I alluded to in your bio?

Rosemary Coates: I've had a long history of being in manufacturing firms. After I graduated college, working at solar turbans and San Diego all the way to graduate school. I got recruited out of Grad school to Hewlett Packard in Silicon Valley - that's where I live, now. After that, I went into management consulting at KPMG, a partner in another firm. So I'd been doing management consulting and software implementations in the supply chain sectors for many years.

 I worked for SAP for five years as manager of their business consulting group in the West. At one point, I was so interested in China, and, of course, you may know that in the early 2000s, everyone was going to China because the market was opening after trying to send it there. It was a low-cost environment, and everyone's competitors were going. I was very interested had always been interested in China and have done a few projects there. I decided to break out on my own, and I started a consulting firm, and that was focused on helping companies and global supply chains, particularly in Chinese manufacturing.

I did that for about 15 years, helping lots of companies shift their operations to China and did many global expansion projects and so forth, which was fun to do. Then along came the 2014 presidential election when Barack Obama and Mitt Romney were China-bashing like crazy, and I'm thinking, "Holy cow, I can't tell anybody what I do for a living. This is awful."

That plus, I'm shutting down so many factories in America. I did a lot of that, and it just really started to get to me. I began to feel like this is just not the right direction to go. We shouldn't be shipping all of our capability and manufacturing overseas. It just started weighing heavily on me. At the same time, because of the presidential election and all the China-bashing that was going on, some of my clients started talking to me about the potential for bringing some manufacturing back. That sparked this whole idea of reshoring.

I gathered some of the people, the top managers that worked for me together, and we designed a process and approach for determining where in the world you should manufacture. We started helping companies understand if they could move to manufacture back to the US or add additional countries, and you know all kinds of decision points. It was evident that reshoring was going to become a trend. I felt strongly that clients were interested in moving back to America to make an economic case. Out of that grew the Reshoring Institute. We incubated under the University of San Diego. They have an extensive supply chain program there. I'm on the board at USD. That's also my Alma ma