Research in March 2026, found that 79% of US manufacturers have already brought outsourced production in-house or are actively doing so. Only 8% haven't even looked at the option.
79% of US manufacturers are reshoring. Only 34% are ready for it.
Jason Tzintzun, Head of Marketing | BigRep
The reshoring debate, at this point, isn't really a debate. The strategic question is settled. A survey of 250 manufacturing decision-makers at US companies with more than 1,000 employees, commissioned by BigRep and conducted by Atomik Research in March 2026, found that 79% have already brought outsourced production in-house or are actively doing so. Only 8% haven't even looked at the option.
What's still being decided is whether the operational reality can keep up with the strategic call.
The same survey found that 34% of respondents describe their current in-house production capacity as fully adequate to absorb supply chain disruptions. 53% say it's only partially adequate. 11% would struggle significantly if they had to rely on it.
So roughly two in three US manufacturers have committed to bringing production home, but they don't yet have the floor capacity to absorb it.
That's the gap operations leaders are now being asked to close, often on a timeline policy and markets won't extend.
Why the Capacity Gap Is Taking Longer to Close Than Expected
Capital isn't the constraint. 73% of respondents have increased their capital equipment budget compared to last year. 22% have raised it by more than 20%. The checks are getting signed.
The barriers cited by those who haven't completed the transition tell a different story. 25% point to the capital cost of equipment, which is the budgetable problem. 22% cite the time required to implement and integrate new systems. Another 22% flag a shortage of skilled staff to operate them.
Notice which of those a purchase order can fix.
Equipment arrives on a schedule. Integration doesn't. Fitting a new cell or line into an existing ERP, MES, and quality framework is its own multi-quarter project, with supplier portal updates, fulfillment commitments, and validation work attached. It's the part of reshoring nobody puts in the press release, and it's where most operations teams are currently losing time.
The workforce side moves more slowly still. Apprenticeships, technical college pipelines, and cross-training existing staff run on cycles that policy environments and shareholder expectations rarely accommodate. You can't recruit a CNC operator the way you can order a CNC.
The Disruption That's Already Happened
It's worth understanding the pressure operations teams are working under. 92% of survey respondents reported at least some operational disruption from tariff and trade policy shifts in the last year. For 12%, the disruption has been fundamental enough to change how they operate. 36% have already revised their reliance on external sourcing as a direct result.
These aren't manufacturers running scenario plans. They're manufacturers who have already absorbed real disruption and are now reshoring under that pressure.
Which means the comfortable version of this transition, where suppliers get qualified in sequence, equipment gets ordered with generous lead times, and workforce capacity builds over multiple cycles, is not the version most of them are running.
What to Prioritize When the Timeline Is Already Tight
A few operational shifts matter more now than they did two years ago.
Treat supplier qualification as parallel work, not sequential. Qualifying two or three domestic suppliers for the same critical component, even when you only plan to use one, gives you a real fallback when the primary hits a capacity wall or a quality issue. Running parallel qualifications adds modest overhead. Hitting a single-source bottleneck mid-transition costs you the schedule.
Map exposure beyond your tier-1 suppliers. A domestic supplier whose own raw materials come from offshore is a domestic supplier on paper only. Operations teams that skip this step tend to discover the exposure mid-transition, when there's no time left to address it.
Build in-house flexibility where lead time is the bottleneck. Bringing the slowest, most lead-time-sensitive components in-house, through technologies like large-format additive manufacturing for tooling, fixtures, and low-volume parts, gives operations a buffer when supplier transitions hit problems. It's not a replacement for a supplier strategy. It's what keeps production running while the supplier strategy works itself out.
And resist the temptation to treat integration as a phase that begins after the equipment lands. Systems integration, validation, and workforce training planned in parallel with procurement is what compresses the timeline. Done sequentially, it's what extends it.
Where This Leaves Operations Leaders
The 79% figure tells you the direction US manufacturing is heading. The 34% is the work still to do. Reshoring intent is no longer the variable manufacturers are competing on. Execution is.
The manufacturers who close the gap in the next two to three years, rather than the next five to seven, will be the ones who treated the constraint honestly from the start. Capital was always going to flow. The slower variables, supplier qualification, integration, workforce, and in-house flexibility, are where the lead is won.
Jason Tzintzun is Head of Marketing at BigRep America. BigRep is a global manufacturer of large-format industrial 3D printing systems used by Fortune 100 manufacturers and engineering teams across automotive, aerospace, and industrial applications.
The content & opinions in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily represent the views of ManufacturingTomorrow
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