The Automation, Supply Chain, Reshoring Connectio

The need to reshore critical manufacturing operations to the U.S. has long been a topic of discussion that’s been reignited recently due to COVID-19 and related supply chain disruptions. As Stephanie Neil, senior editor at Automation World, noted in her feature article “How Automation Enables Viable Reshoring”: When the pandemic reached the U.S. in 2020, about half of the world’s disposable masks were produced in China. As COVID-19 became a global healthcare crisis, face masks became essential and countries imposed restrictions on exports, which increased the worldwide shortages of masks and raw materials, according to the U.S. National Institute of Health’s National Library of Medicine. “All it took was stopping the supply of disposable masks produced overseas from coming to the U.S. for us to be critically impacted,” said Raphael Kryszek, founder and CEO of Intrepid Protect, a manufacturing start-up focused on producing face coverings made at a new state-of-the-art facility in Los Angeles, Calif. It was the PPE shortage, a dependence on foreign sourcing of goods, and a lack of quality-control standards that prompted Kryszek to make manufacturing in America a viable option.