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Responsiveness, the primary reason behind re-shoring manufacturing activities to the UK: an Indian industry perspective

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-06-30, 09:12 authored by Hamid Moradlou, Chris Backhouse, Rajesh Ranganathan
Purpose: Due to today’s volatile business environment companies have started to establish a better understanding of the total risk/benefit-balance concerning manufacturing location decisions of their component supply. The focus is now much more on comprehensive and strategic supply chain issues rather than simply relying on piece part cost analysis. This has led to an emerging trend called re-shoring. The aim of this paper is to understand the primary motivation behind the re-shoring strategy in the UK and investigate the factors that influence this decision from Indian industries perspectives. Design/methodology/approach: The analysis of the paper is based on interviews conducted in the UK and India (State of Tamil Nadu) in various industries including automotive, industrial goods, textile, and marine. For this purpose an interview framework based on key enablers identified from the literature, being IT solutions, manufacturing equipment and human factors. This provided an assessment of the capability of the companies for being responsive to western demand. Findings: The findings indicate that re-shoring to the UK is the result of inadequacy in responsiveness and long production lead-times of the Indian suppliers. The outcome of this paper indicates that the top factors behind this inadequacy in responsiveness are logistics and transportation, electricity shortage, excessive paperwork and working attitude. Originality/value: This paper aims to fill the gap in the re-shoring literature by providing a clear picture behind the reason for re-shoring in the UK and identify the drivers behind this shortcoming in the component supply from India.

History

School

  • Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering

Published in

International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management

Volume

47

Issue

2/3

Pages

222-236

Citation

MORADLOU, H., BACKHOUSE, C.J. and RANGANATHAN, R., 2017. Responsiveness, the primary reason behind re-shoring manufacturing activities to the UK: an Indian industry perspective. International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management, 47 (2/3), pp. 222-236.

Publisher

© Emerald

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2016-06-14

Publication date

2017-03-06

Copyright date

2017

Notes

This paper was published in the journal International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPDLM-06-2015-0149.

ISSN

0960-0035

Language

  • en

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