Abstract
Over the last two decades, companies have increasingly been re-evaluating their off-shoring strategies and implementing decisions on relocations of second degree (RSD). In some cases, the RSD decision has been implemented through back-shoring. The topic has attracted the attention of several scholars, some of whom have specifically investigated the role of Industry 4.0 technologies in the back-shoring decision-making process. This paper aims to shed new light on the role that Industry 4.0 technologies play as a driver or an enabling factor for companies that are evaluating RSD alternatives. A two-step explorative approach has been used for this research. In the first step, a theoretical approach has been followed by developing a structured literature review based on 115 Scopus-indexed journal articles. The second step of the methodology is based on the empirical evidence of European countries using the UnivAQ manufacturing reshoring dataset. The collected data provides evidence of the growing interest of scholars in this issue; however, attention has mainly been focused on two single technologies, production automation and additive manufacturing. The empirical data offers interesting findings in terms of industry and geographic characterisation.
Highlights
Manufacturing activities have been off-shored for a long time
After all the co-authors had carefully read the full text of these articles, the following excluding criteria were adopted: - journal articles focusing on the back-shoring of companies operating in industries not related to manufacturing (e.g. ICT companies) - documents published in sources without peer review systems - journal articles in which the searched terms are used to indicate a different concept from the one of interest - documents referring to functions other than operations
An analysis of the 115 sampled journal articles clearly shows that the relationship between Industry 4.0 technologies as a whole and back-shoring has been addressed by only four journal articles
Summary
Manufacturing activities have been off-shored (and, often, out-sourced) for a long time. In the last two decades, companies have been increasingly re-evaluating their previous off-shoring decisions having encountered several off-shoring pitfalls [1]. As a consequence, they have implemented decisions on relocations of second degree (RSD) [2], referred to as reshoring [3], that consist of the relocation of manufacturing activities either to the home country (relocation to the home country [RHC] or backshoring) or to another host country (relocation to a third country [RTC]). In this paper, we use the term reshoring to refer to a generic RSD decision that is, independently of the governance mode (in- vs out-sourcing), adopted to manage relocated manufacturing activities. In this paper, we use the term nearshoring to refer to an RSD in a second host country located in a company’s home region
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