Hard lessons learned from the 2020 pandemic taught us that we needed to rebuild and re-establish our U.S. supply-chain ecosystem. The systemic shock to our global supply chains left us with bottlenecks, shortages and an acute awareness of our overdependence on imports.

It is essential to understand how we got to this weakened condition so that we can restore self-sufficiency, re-establish supply-chain resilience and increase competitiveness. Doing so will provide opportunities for in-house and commercial heat treaters since many products now imported are in heat-treating-intense industries. For example, 35% of reshoring has been of transportation equipment.