by Gary Mintchell | Jul 9, 2025 | News
I have had a bunch of vacation travel (with another upcoming) so am a bit behind on some news. The Reshoring Initiative has had an admirable proselytizing activity for quite some time. I’ve met and talked with its President, Harry Moser, a couple of times.
Even before becoming an editor some 25 years ago, I pondered the necessity for a strong manufacturing base (in our country, but each other country, as well) as a strategic advantage. These thoughts married my career in manufacturing with my university studies in international politics and political philosophy. As I watched bean counters take control of companies and send manufacturing off-shore pursuing low wages (and evidently ignoring other ancillary costs), I pondered the effects on the country.
The news here is the Reshoring Initiative 2024 Annual Report. The concern I have about the report (which is the same with publicity about manufacturing investments and jobs announced by the Trump administration) centers on announcements rather than real numbers.
These reservations hold for the second news item below—that of GE Appliances reshoring some jobs it had previously shipped overseas.
The thought is welcome for the US, but we must watch for the reality.
The Reshoring Initiative 2024 Annual Report shows that 244,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs were announced in 2024 via reshoring and foreign direct investment (FDI), continuing the nation’s push to rebuild domestic production capacity. While early 2025 job announcements are trending lower, policy stability could quickly unlock another wave of reshoring-driven investment.
Since 2010, over 2 million jobs have been announced as U.S. companies and foreign investors bring manufacturing closer to U.S. customers, driven by rising geopolitical risk, supply chain vulnerabilities, and growing bipartisan support for American industrial competitiveness.
Key Findings from the Report:
- 244,000 jobs were announced in 2024; 1.7 million jobs have been filled since 2010.
- Reshoring by U.S. headquartered companies outpaced FDI by foreign headquartered companies by the largest margin on record in 2024.
- High-tech industries are driving growth: 88% of 2024 jobs were in high or medium-high tech sectors, rising to 90% in early 2025.
- Industries leading in 2024: Computer & Electronics, Electrical Equipment (including EV batteries and solar), and Transportation Equipment.
- Texas, South Carolina, and Mississippi are top 2025 states for reshoring and FDI.
- Asia remains the largest source of reshored + FDI jobs, while South Korea, China, and Germany led among individual countries.
- Tariffs are now a key motivator: Cited in 454% more cases in 2025 vs. 2024. Government incentives cited 49% less as previous subsidies phase out.
- Workforce constraints loom large: U.S. manufacturing apprenticeships rose 83% over the past decade, but far more skilled workers are needed to sustain reshoring growth.
Key risks:
- Policy uncertainty is delaying investment decisions.
- Potential retaliatory tariffs could dampen U.S. export opportunities.
- Low-tech industries remain under-reshored, leaving U.S. supply chains vulnerable for mass-market consumer goods.
- Without comprehensive reforms, U.S. manufacturing costs remain 10–50% higher than offshore competitors, driving most import decisions.
The Reshoring Initiative advocates for a true national industrial policy focused on:
- Massive investment in skilled workforce development (modeled after German apprenticeships).
- A 20% lower USD to improve global cost competitiveness.
- Retention of immediate expensing of capital investments.
- Smarter use of tariffs and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis to drive lasting reshoring.
GE Appliances Reshoring Again!
On June 26, GE Appliances, a Haier Company, announced a $490 million investment to reshore production of washers and washer/dryers from China, creating 800 new full-time jobs in 2027. The Reshoring Initiative offered to highlight this announcement because of GE Appliance’s historic role launching, documenting and making credible U.S. reshoring.
The Reshoring initiative was founded in 2010. In 2012, despite my best efforts, reshoring was still a trickle that no one had heard of. Then I, and I believe hundreds of thousands of others, read Charles Fishman’s article “The Insourcing Boom” in the December 2012 issue of The Atlantic. In great detail, Charles described how GE Appliances reshored appliance production from China to Appliance Park, which employed “a tenth of the people in its heyday.” The article reviewed a broad range of benefits GE Appliances achieved by reshoring. Most memorable to me was the benefit of having manufacturing near engineering. The assembly team and engineering cooperated to simplify appliance design to reduce component cost and assembly time to make U.S. assembly competitive. Even though the Chinese manufacturing cost was still substantially lower, the U.S. total cost was lower due to inventory costs and delivery issues. For years, I quoted the article in my presentations. With this announcement and several earlier investments, Kevin Nolan, CEO GE Appliances, has walked his talk: “I’ve always said, this is just economics, people are going to realize that the savings they thought they had aren’t real, and it’s going to be better and cheaper to make them here.”
Harry Moser, President, Reshoring Initiative
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 8, 2025 | Asset Performance Management, Process Control
Process automation companies like sending press releases when they get a new project. This news in interesting on two fronts. One, it details the use of drones and robots for monitoring and maintenance. Two, this details Yokogawa and Shell working together on the project.
Yokogawa Electric Corp. announced that it has formalized a long-term agreement with Shell Global Solutions International B.V. (“Shell”) to integrate and further develop technologies for utilizing robots and drones in plant monitoring and maintenance. Under the agreement, Yokogawa will add an advanced machine vision tool called Operator Round by Exception (ORE), developed by Shell, into its own OpreX Robot Management Core. The enhanced software service will be made available by Yokogawa to customers in the energy, chemicals, and other industries.
ORE is a digital solution that uses machine vision and AI analytics to enable robots to autonomously perform a number of tasks in the operator round process, such as reading gauges and checking for leaks and machinery issues. It is the result of a two-year collaborative effort within Shell, which combined machine vision strategy with deep capabilities in the field of integrity management, remote site inspection, and corrosion management.
OpreX Robot Management Core is a key product in Yokogawa’s robot solutions. The software helps customers maintain their facilities in a safer and more efficient manner by integrating the management of various types of robots that perform plant maintenance tasks conventionally carried out by humans. When connected to a plant’s control and safety systems, the data acquired can be used to issue instructions to robots, thus enabling the first step to be taken toward autonomous plant operations. The addition of Shell’s ORE technology will significantly increase the number of use cases available to customers through OpreX Robot Management Core.
Moving forward, Yokogawa robotics operations will deploy at two Shell facilities as a pilot into how robotics and drones can deliver value through efficiencies in plant monitoring and maintenance.
This collaboration is the first key milestone for Yokogawa working alongside Shell in the collaboration space at the Energy Transition Campus Amsterdam, which was created by Shell in 2022 to provide a platform for collaboration between companies, societal organizations, governments, and universities to work on tomorrow’s energy solutions. Shell and Yokogawa have also agreed to collaborate on an aligned R&D roadmap to further develop and enhance the machine vision technology, ensuring continuous innovation and improvement. This collaboration underscores both companies’ commitment to providing cutting-edge solutions to the energy and industrial sectors.
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 8, 2025 | Commentary
There are two groups of people I’ve yet to see anything approaching intelligence about manufacturing—politicians and journalists.
M.G. Siegler writes in his latest newsletter about the new pressures from the Trump administration to get Apple to manufacture iPhones in the US. These politicians seem to think there is a magic wand that will immediately set up factories, find workers, build automation, establish supply chain, and start production at a competitive cost.
Now we know what the magic wand is—AI.
Siegler quotes:
White House trade advisor Peter Navarro criticized Apple CEO Tim Cook on Monday over the company’s response to pressure from the Trump administration to make more of its products outside China.
“Going back to the first Trump term, Tim Cook has continually asked for more time in order to move his factories out of China,” Navarro said in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” “I mean it’s the longest-running soap opera in Silicon Valley.”
I first ran across Siegler when he wrote for Michael Arrington’s old TechCrunch website. He then became a VC for a while after Arrington sold TechCrunch. He’s on his own, now, writing about technology, especially Apple, and entertainment.
Siegler continues:
On one hand, it’s sort of wild that the administration has zeroed in on Apple here given not only all of Cook’s legwork over many years now to get into the President’s good graces, but also because the entire idea of manufacturing the iPhone in the US is just pure crazytown fantasy. Even if it were possible for Apple move such manufacturing, it would take years to get all the pieces up and running. And it would all-but destroy Apple’s business as we know it today because it would destroy the economics of their most-important device.
Siegler then offers advice to Tim Cook:
It’s not that complicated. Cook should just say they’re going to move iPhone manufacturing to the US – and then never actually follow through with it. Sure, this takes some amount of soul-selling to do, but honestly, we’re past that point already. How many other companies have promised things to give the President a good soundbite that simply are not going to happen? Undoubtedly a lot.
But then Navarro has a simple solution:
With all these new advanced manufacturing techniques and the way things are moving with AI and things like that, it’s inconceivable to me that Tim Cook could not produce his iPhones elsewhere around the world and in this country.
So, all of you manufacturing technology geeks who read my musings, what are you doing? Why haven’t you used AI yet to magically reduce manufacturing costs and smooth the supply chain and source materials?
Am I being sarcastic? Those are all questions (except the AI part) I wrestled with 50 years ago. I bet you are all wrestling with them today. Every day. As we used to say, it’s nontrivial.
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 7, 2025 | Data Management
This news concerns unstructured data management. I wrote about Datadobi several times in 2021 and 2022. Not much since. They have released a new version of their StorageMAP, its “heterogeneous unstructured data management solution.”
StorageMAP 7.3 enables organizations to create policy-driven workflows, act on data more precisely, and migrate between S3-compatible platforms while maintaining compliance.
StorageMAP 7.3 introduces policy-driven workflows that allow administrators to define tasks executed by its workflow engine in response to specific triggers, such as a time schedule. A “dry run” feature facilitates reviewing the scope of a policy before full execution.
These new workflows support a wide range of use cases, including periodic automated archival, creating data pipelines to feed GenAI applications, identifying and relocating non-business-related data to a quarantine area, and more. Once policies are published, StorageMAP runs the workflows on schedule without requiring manual supervision.
In addition, StorageMAP 7.3 adds support for granular file-level deletes. Administrators can identify files that match specific criteria and save them as input to a targeted delete job, which StorageMAP will execute. Each delete job generates a report that documents the job’s details and outcome.
This functionality addresses situations where a coarse-grained directory-level deletion is not possible due to the presence of both relevant and disposable data. By enabling precise file selection, StorageMAP ensures that administrators can apply accurate and effective deletion policies.
Object migration enhancements
StorageMAP 7.3 also enhances its core object migration functionality by supporting the migration of locked objects between S3-compatible storage systems. This allows compliant data stored in a Write Once Read Many (WORM) format to be relocated across different vendor platforms while retaining its retention date and legal holds.
To support cost and performance objectives, the solution includes the ability to select the S3 storage class during object migration or replication. By specifying the desired storage class at the time of the job, organizations can avoid unnecessary post-migration lifecycle policies and ensure data is written directly to the appropriate tier.
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 4, 2025 | Personal Development
Every year I suggest that all Americans take some time to read a few things to refresh our memories about the founding of our country. It’s probably not a bad practice for all of you who do not live here just for the ideals.
Read
- The Declaration of Independence
- The Preamble to the Constitution
- Actually the entire Constitution
- If not all, at least the first 10 amendments—the Bill of Rights
- Bonus points—read The Federalist Papers
These documents are full of compromises—something that has made it last so long. And something we seem unwilling to do this past decade or so.
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 3, 2025 | News
PwC have released a report on industrial manufacturing merger & acquisition (M&A) activity for the first half of 2025. The report suggests a recalibration of capital allocation in response to shifting macro conditions.
Deal volume moderated amid new US tariffs, geopolitical volatility and selective private equity (PE) engagement. Yet, investors are pursuing high-conviction opportunities aligned with long-term structural trends. Strategic buyers and sponsors are doubling down on automation, defense and energy transition — sectors where innovation, policy support and resilience to cyclicality are driving premium valuations and sustained interest.
Key developments include:
- Tariff-induced valuation gaps: Newly implemented US tariffs introduced friction into cross-border dealmaking, stalling transactions with international exposure and widening bid-ask spreads.
- Strategic divestitures accelerate: Corporations are intensifying portfolio optimization efforts, shedding non-core assets to refocus on high-growth areas. Notably, several industrial conglomerates announced spin-offs in the advanced materials segment.
- Tech-driven acquisitions: Demand for automation, AI and digital transformation capabilities continues to drive acquisitions aimed at enhancing productivity and operational agility.
- Supply chain reconfiguration: Heightened geopolitical and trade risks are prompting companies to reevaluate supply chain dependencies. This is fueling interest in domestic and nearshore M&A as part of broader resilience strategies.
- PE’s selective deployment: While overall PE activity slowed, firms remain active in resilient sectors — particularly technology and business services — where tariff exposure is limited and long-term value creation remains viable.
Looking ahead: Navigating uncertainty with strategic focus
Key strategic considerations include:
- Staying ahead of policy shifts: Ongoing trade negotiations and potential regulatory changes could materially affect cross-border deal flows. Proactive monitoring and scenario planning will be essential to maintain deal momentum.
- Reinforcing due diligence discipline: In a complex geopolitical and economic environment, thorough due diligence remains critical to assess risk, validate value creation potential and enable strategic alignment.
- Harnessing technology for competitive advantage: Automation, AI and digital tools are increasingly central to industrial competitiveness. M&A and internal investment targeting these capabilities should be a strategic priority.
- Targeting high-growth, policy-backed sectors: Government-backed initiatives in defense and infrastructure continue to support robust deal pipelines. Strategic acquirers should explore opportunities where public funding and private innovation intersect.
- Reshaping supply chains through M&A: As companies adapt to geopolitical risks and cost pressures, acquisitions of nearshore or domestic suppliers can enhance supply chain resilience and agility.
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 2, 2025 | Personal Development
Learning is not compulsory…neither is survival—W. Edwards Deming, quality master
There are people who have a set of things they know and judge all events and actions against that set. There are people who have the continuous unease of not knowing. The former can be typed (perhaps too rigidly) as “FJ or Feeling Judgmental” on the Myers-Briggs Types Indicator. The latter as “TP or Thinking Perceptive.” Anyone who has read more than a few of my thoughts can easily figure out which type describes me.
At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.—Matthew 18
As with all spiritual texts, this can be open to numerous interpretations. I choose in this context to reflect on “beginner’s mind.” Wisdom about as ancient as humans in community recognizes that if our heads are full of knowledge or “stuff,” then there is no room for growth, for learning.
Unless we change and become as little children, that is, unless we are open and fascinated to learn more, we will be stuck where we are.
Seth Godin remarked, “Learning is the difficult work of experiencing incompetence on our way to mastery.”
Unless we become like children—stumbling until we suddenly walk; needing an adult to keep the bicycle up until suddenly we are riding; stumbling over pronouncing a new word until suddenly we are fluent.
Where do you feel the tension of unease of not knowing that will entice you into trying until you learn?
by Gary Mintchell | Jul 1, 2025 | Generative AI
Deepgram is an intriguing company. Have they solved the problem that Apple still misses with Siri or Amazon with its new Alexa? They bill themselves as “World’s Only Enterprise-Ready, Real-Time, and Cost-Effective Conversational AI API.” They have developed a voice AI platform.
In addition, its CEO Scott Stephenson has become a YouTuber with a YouTube channel (billed as a podcast, but it isn’t one), “The Scott Stephenson AI Show” — A No-Hype, Deep-Dive Podcast on the AI Revolution. Oh, he’s also on Spotify. I am not. I download podcasts on Overcast. I haven’t the time to watch many 40+ minute YouTube videos. I’ve watched much of this one. He does provide a knowledgeable overview in this episode.
Back to the Deepgram API.
Deepgram announced the general availability (GA) of its Voice Agent API, a single, unified voice-to-voice interface that gives developers full control to build context-aware voice agents that power natural, responsive conversations. Combining speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and large language model (LLM) orchestration with contextualized conversational logic into a unified architecture, the Voice Agent API gives developers the choice of using Deepgram’s fully integrated stack (leveraging industry-leading Nova-3 STT and Aura-2 TTS models) or bringing their own LLM and TTS models. It delivers the simplicity developers love and the controllability enterprises need to deploy real-time, intelligent voice agents at scale. Today, companies like Aircall, Jack in the Box, StreamIt, and OpenPhone are building voice agents with Deepgram to save costs, reduce wait times, and increase customer loyalty.
I can no longer download and play with software like in the old days. I’d suggest that if you’re a developer and need a voice assistant, try it out.
For teams taking the DIY route, the challenge isn’t just connecting models but also building and operating the entire runtime layer that makes real-time conversations work. Teams must manage live audio streaming, accurately detect when a user has finished speaking, coordinate model responses, handle mid-sentence interruptions, and maintain a natural conversational cadence. While some platforms offer partial orchestration features, most APIs do not provide a fully integrated runtime. As a result, developers are often left to manage streaming, session state, and coordination logic across fragmented services, which adds complexity and delays time to production.
Deepgram’s Voice Agent API removes this burden by providing a single, unified API that integrates speech-to-text, LLM reasoning, and text-to-speech with built-in support for real-time conversational dynamics. Capabilities such as barge-in handling and turn-taking prediction are model-driven and managed natively within the platform. This eliminates the need to stitch together multiple vendors or maintain custom orchestration, enabling faster prototyping, reduced complexity, and more time focused on building high-quality experiences.
In addition to the Voice Agent API, organizations seeking broader integrations can leverage Deepgram’s extensive partner ecosystem, including Kore.ai, OneReach.ai, Twilio and others, to access comprehensive conversational AI solutions and services powered by Deepgram APIs.
Key capabilities include:
- Flexible Deployment: Run the complete voice stack in cloud, VPC, or on-prem environments to meet enterprise requirements for security, compliance, and performance.
- Runtime-Level Orchestration: Deepgram’s runtime supports mid-session control, real-time prompt updates, model switching, and event-driven signaling to adapt agent behavior dynamically.
- Bring-Your-Own Models: Teams can integrate their own LLMs or TTS systems while retaining Deepgram’s orchestration, streaming pipeline, and real-time responsiveness.
In addition to control and performance, the Voice Agent API is built for cost efficiency across large-scale deployments. When teams run entirely on Deepgram’s vertically integrated stack, pricing is fully consolidated at a flat rate of $4.50 per hour. This provides predictable, all-in-one billing that simplifies planning and scales with usage.
by Gary Mintchell | Jun 30, 2025 | Personal Development
From Shane Parrish of Brain Food. The entire self-help industry in one sentence: Do what makes mornings exciting and nights peaceful. Will this make me excited to wake up? Will this let me sleep in peace? Everything that fails both tests is noise.
Health begins with good sleep.
Meaning comes from getting up excited to serve others according to your talents.
by Gary Mintchell | Jun 29, 2025 | News
Openings remain for this year’s Ignition Community Conference. This event usually sells out quickly, so I was amazed to learn spots remain open to attend. Of course, Inductive Automation changed venues from the Harris Center in Folsom to the Sacramento Conference Center. More friendly to get to than going to Folsom. But I’ll miss the ambience of prior conferences.
If you are an Ignition user or developer or if you are exploring alternatives to your HMI/SCADA/IoT platforms, check out this conference. I’ve been to many and always found it informative and a great way to meet people doing the same thing. Many cool ideas to expand your thinking about software applications. Oh, there’s a reason they call it “Community” not “Customer” Conference.
See you there.
