How Companies are Bringing Manufacturing Home from China with Rosemary Coates

Connect with Rosemary Coates: Email: rcoates@ReshoringInstitute.org Website: rcoates@ReshoringInstitute.org LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosemarycoates/ Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. My guest today is Rosemary Coates. Rosemary is the founder and executive director of the Reshoring Institute, a 501 C three nonprofit and nonpartisan organization focusing on expanding US manufacturing. She's also the President of Blue Silk Consulting, a supply chain management consulting firm. Ms. Coates has been a management consultant for 30 plus years, helping global supply chain clients worldwide. In the early 2000s, she assisted many companies source products from China and set up operations there. But now helps companies with their global operation strategy by determining what products to manufacture in each market, including what can be manufactured in America. Rosemary, welcome to the show. Rosemary Coates: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Lisa Ryan: Absolutely. Would you please share with us a bit of your background and journey that I alluded to in your bio? Rosemary Coates: I've had a long history of being in manufacturing firms. After I graduated college, working at solar turbans and San Diego all the way to graduate school. I got recruited out of Grad school to Hewlett Packard in Silicon Valley - that's where I live, now. After that, I went into management consulting at KPMG, a partner in another firm. So I'd been doing management consulting and software implementations in the supply chain sectors for many years.  I worked for SAP for five years as manager of their business consulting group in the West. At one point, I was so interested in China, and, of course, you may know that in the early 2000s, everyone was going to China because the market was opening after trying to send it there. It was a low-cost environment, and everyone's competitors were going. I was very interested had always been interested in China and have done a few project