“The vigor with which companies left to go to the Far East and pursue low cost country sourcing has certainly not been reversed. That's why it is largely emotional; it's largely talk.” -Thomas Goldsby, Dee and Jimmy Haslam Chair of Logistics at the Haslam College of Business at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville

Business never allows us to stop learning. You might not take formal classes or participate in a training program, but real-world circumstances are a constant - and sometimes brutal - teacher.

In this week’s Art of Supply interview, Kelly Barner welcomes a real teacher, a professor actually, to share his point of view on X-shoring, but also to talk about how companies learn what they can and can’t do with supply chains and production and how government intervention and funding may or may not help reorient where in the world production takes place.

Thomas Goldsby is the Dee and Jimmy Haslam Chair of Logistics at the Haslam College of Business at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. He is also the Co-Executive Director of their Global Supply Chain Institute. Perhaps most importantly he is actively instructing and inspiring the next generation of supply chain management professionals.

In this episode of the Art of Supply podcast, Thomas and Kelly discuss:

• What X-shoring is and how companies currently make decisions about where to source and produce
• The material importance of mapping out supply chains
• Understanding the tradeoffs between automation quality and labor costs, and how both impact product quality
• Why all companies should be making an effort to experiment, learn fast, and then get the economics of change squared away

Links:

• Thomas Goldsby on LinkedIn
• Kelly Barner on LinkedIn
• Art of Supply LinkedIn newsletter 
• Art of Supply on AOP
• Subscribe to This Week in Procurement