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17 HARTFORDBUSINESS.COM | NOVEMBER 15, 2021 TOTAL PROJECT SIZE: 25,000 SF Building For Your Success ABLE COIL BOLTON, CT For over 55 years, metal buildings have been a staple of PDS. For this project, we were tasked by Able Coil to build a new state of the art pre-engineered metal office building and renovate their existing 20,000 square foot building into a new manufacturing facility in Bolton CT. Complete with multiple new offices and several specialty rooms, the exterior finish is a multifaceted design complete with Nichiha Vintage Cement siding and ACM paneling, full length store front windows and stone veneer. Structural upgrades to the existing building were necessary to bring it up to code and to support the new solar panel system. With in-house engineering, PDS can design the right building to fit your budget and timeline. SPOTLIGHT ON: PRE-ENGINEERED METAL BUILDINGS 107 Old Windsor Road, Bloomfield, CT 06002 | 860.242.8586 | pdsec.com THINK • PLAN • BUILD project, but Horst officially opened the new building last month. Since 2017, Cromwell-based Carey Manufacturing has returned to Connecticut about 80% of the work it outsourced to China in the years preceding, said CEO Paul Lavoie. Soon it will be 100%, he added. Carey jumped on the outsourcing bandwagon in the early 2000s, shifting almost all of its manufacturing to China and basically operating as a distributor for a decade, Lavoie said. (The company did acquire Amatom Electronic Hardware in 2003, and continued manufacturing its products — including handles, spacers and fasteners for electronic hardware — in Connecticut.) Carey started reshoring operations when the U.S. began placing tariffs on Chinese imports in 2017, Lavoie said. The process wasn't cheap. The company spent about $5 million on equipment to expand its manufacturing operation in Cromwell, and to take on additional staff, Lavoie said. Issues like the rising price of raw materials are still a problem for Carey, but the company isn't dealing with logistical problems currently preventing others from getting their products to customers. "There are lots of parts sitting in containers off the shore that people can't get here, and we're having people call us who haven't called us in 15 years," Lavoie said. "As we say, 'Fun fact: USA-made parts don't get stuck on cargo ships out at port.' " Expensive proposition But even though officials at many manufacturing companies are talking about reshoring, it's not a widespread trend, experts say. Many challenges stand in the way. "We're not really seeing people come back from overseas," said Susan Martinelli, Hartford office leader at RSM US LLP, an accounting and consulting firm focused on middle- market businesses. "It's because it's really expensive, and they've made huge investments in other parts of the world." Matt Dollard, who leads RSM's strategy advisory practice, said many companies talked about reshoring at the start of the pandemic, but there hasn't been a massive surge in returning operations to the U.S. "We have had a number of conversations with clients who have said 'help us figure out how to [reshore],' " Dollard said. "In every case, the client decided not to go forward because it was too expensive, and it took too long." Another local company that has dipped its toe in the reshoring waters is New Britain-based tool maker Stanley Black & Decker. It began pursuing a strategy about six years ago to locate manufacturing work as closely as possible to customers, said Martin Guay, the company's vice president of business development. In fact, when Stanley bought Craftsman tools from Sears four years ago, it moved the company's manufacturing from China to Texas, to be closer to the brand's largely North American customer base. "It's more of a regional strategy than a global strategy, but we think it makes great business sense," Guay said. While globalization may have appeared to have little downside in the early part of this century, politics, labor regulations and trade regimes have changed in the past decade or so, Guay said. "I also think the supply chain disruption of the last year or two showed how fragile the [global supply chain] is," Guay said. "I think people are more closely scrutinizing the benefits of that — and more importantly, the risks of that." Susan Martinelli A Horst Engineering employee works a machine on the shop floor. HBJ PHOTO | STEVE LASCHEVER CT manufacturing output: 2010-2020 Connecticut manufacturing's economic output last year was the highest since 2015 and matched its 2019 total, according to the Connecticut Business & Industry Association's 2021 CT Manufacturing Report. Here's a break down of the sector's economic production in the state over the past decade. Year Output (in billions of dollars) 2010 $29.18 2011 $28.43 2012 $29.01 2013 $30.24 2014 $29.30 2015 $29.96 2016 $27.72 2017 $28.54 2018 $28.79 2019 $29.66 2020 $29.66 Source: Connecticut Business & Industry Association's 2021 CT Manufacturing Report/U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis