Europe MRO Sourcing: Managing Spare Parts Risk as Plants Reshore
A plant manager I worked with a few years ago described reshoring in one sentence: "We moved the factory back faster than we moved the supply base." The equipment arrived. The production line was commissioned. But the spare parts strategy that had been built around a different geography, different suppliers, and different lead times hadn't caught up yet. That gap is where a lot of the real cost of reshoring shows up — not in the capital project, but in the first eighteen months of operation, when a control component fails and procurement realizes the supplier relationships that used to make sourcing straightforward no longer exist in the new location. As more manufacturers move production back into Europe, or build new European capacity alongside existing Asian or North American sites, the conversation inside procurement teams has shifted. It's no longer just "where do we build." It's "how do we keep this line running once it's built" — a...