Many North American Automotive Electronics Assembly Corporations are re-shoring their ventures from overseas. Some of these top companies include Rockwell Automation, General Electric, Cognex, and Gentex Corporation.

It goes beyond politics for these companies to engage in competitive efforts to build products in North America. But the only way that a re-shoring movement is feasible is to automate the process. The long factory worker assembly lines are an idea of the past. As manufacturing companies develop their business plans moving forward, they will have to be built on a solid foundation of lower input with higher output and increased quality. As the complexity and miniaturization of parts are accomplished, quality in production will be essential to maintaining a solid competitive edge.

The externalities of conducting trade whereby low wages, environmental disregard, human health and wellbeing are accepted for a low-cost product are now being addressed into financial liabilities with complications expected to grow. However, moving your manufacturing to an automated in-house system will not only improve your overall quality, and losses, but will quickly put you at the competitive edge your that your Electronics Manufacturing Company will require in order to forge forward as a leader in electronics.

We took a look at one of these automotive re-shoring corporations, Gentex Corporation. Gentex manufactures automatic-dimming rearview mirrors and camera-based driver assistance systems for the automotive industry. A couple of years ago, Gentex Corp re-shored their manufacturing efforts from Mexico and China to Zeeland, Michigan. The only way in which Gentex was able to make this re-shore movement was via automation saying, “Making modern car parts in the U.S. today is going to take a whole lot of robots.” - Gentex Corp., autonews.com

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Since Gentex’s venture to re-shore with automation a few years ago, we took a look at their value on the NASDAQ and noticed a sharp gain around the same time they changed their business model to an in-house automated model.