Manufacturing Insights

When you think about offshoring, restoring, or nearshoring, you’re probably thinking about cost. Certainly, the cost of labor and energy is a primary deciding factor when it comes to offshoring, restoring, or neashoring decisions. But what about the hidden costs of offshoring? This is a subject our guest knows a lot about. John Gardner writes about the hidden costs of offshoring and the increasingly apparent benefits of nearshoring. He is the author of Manufacture Local: How to Make America the Manufacturing Superpower of the World.

What does it take to balance high product development velocity with cost efficiency? In this Executive Talk podcast we hear from Hank Marcy, Former VP Global Product Technology, Whirlpool Corporation, about how he employed a modular strategy and smart tools like aPriori to keep costs down and velocity high.

In 2025 manufacturers are facing pressure from all sides: Inflation Labor shortages Fluctuating materials prices Uncertainty about the future of tariffs All impacting decisions for offshoring or nearshoring This is a perfect moment, in other words, to reconsider strategy and make sure you have the insights you need to make crucial strategic decisions about your manufacturing operations. To learn how today’s forward-thinking manufacturers are staying ahead with the information they need to mitigate risk and keep a lid on costs, we are hearing today from someone who spends her life talking to and helping top worldwide manufacturers — the CEO of aPriori Technologies, Stephanie Feraday.  In this conversation we talk about cost, competition, and what the top manufacturers are doing to stay ahead in the economic climate of 2025.

When tech architecture is decades out of date, manufacturers end up with a tech stack that costs a lot and delivers little. All this can change with smart AI solutions. Mike Bowers is Chief Architect at FairCom where he helps companies reduce costs in their manufacturing processes by finding the right technological solutions to solve their biggest problems.

We talk about technology adoption within the manufacturing industry as if it's a magic elixir. With the right digitization effort and the right insights platform, we say that manufacturers can lower their cost, decrease design errors, speed time to market, maybe even get CO2 under control. But is that true? Or is it all too good to be true? My guest today helps manufacturers throughout Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and India through their digitization efforts and realizing the promise of Industry 4.o. Paul Haimes is the VP of EMEAI Solutions Consulting at PTC. And he's here today to talk to us about the promises of Industry 4.0 and whether or not they really are too good to be true.

If you want to make meaningful progress towards key targets, whether that's profit margins, production cycles, or sustainability goals, you need to be humble about where you went wrong in the past and find the right insights to bridge the information gap for your decisions moving forward. In this second installment of aPriori's executive talk series, Senior Director of Product Marketing Chris Jeznach talks to Peter Bilello is CEO of CIMdata, a global researcher and strategy consultancy focused on product lifecycle management and realizing the value of PLM for the entire organization.

In today's climate of increasing competition and decreasing time to hit an ever-shrinking target, the obsession of every executive must be: How can technology help me? How can the latest smart software and solutions help my company do more with less, reduce errors, and get more value from our data? Here on the Manufacturing Insights Podcast, we thought this would be a great time for a series of high-level discussions about these market-shaping questions and how executives today are thinking about them. For this series, we're bringing in a special guest host: Chris Jeznach is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at aPriori, and a strategic thinker about the ways that market dynamics in the software solutions and technology space really impact the productivity and ultimately the success of product manufacturers. In this first interview of the Exec Talk series, Chris Jeznach talks to Fielder Hiss, aPriori's Chief Product Officer, and an expert in the ways that the solutions manufacturers use to design, produce, and service their products work together to unlock value across the product lifecycle.

Time is money, but for manufacturers designing and releasing new products to the market, how much money is it really worth to be on time? Or put another way, what is the real cost of delays when it comes to design engineering? Matt Mullan is the Senior Director of Cost Model Development at aPriori. He comes from decades of experience in aerospace engineering and cost modeling, and he's brought to us today some sobering statistics on the cash value of time, as well as some concrete solutions on how to recoup both time and savings in the design process.

Get the update on the adoption of AI within the manufacturing industry, from an expert in Industrial AI. Bryan DeBois is the director of industrial AI at RoviSys, where he helps manufacturers realize the value from incorporating AI into their industrial processes.

Shifting left in product design empowers teams to make informed decisions early in the development process, significantly impacting cost, manufacturability, and sustainability. Using a digital copilot, designers can access expert insights and real-time data, enhancing their ability to create more efficient and effective products, thereby reducing downstream risks and accelerating time to market.