For those of us who followed the Trump administration closely, the idea of “Infrastructure Week” was a running joke in Washington from February 2017 until the point in 2018 when all sides stopped kidding themselves.

The Shear Assisted Processing and Extrusion (ShAPETM) project shows the potential to increase throughput and reduce manufacturing costs and energy use for aluminum alloy 7075 extrusions. Aluminum alloy 7075 (AA7075) is a high-strength, low-weight metal alloy that can handle heavy mechanical stresses.

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.

My last column was a brief introduction to the Reshoring Initiative’s resources and some best practices regarding what companies can do to accelerate reshoring to gain business. Now we would like to discuss in more detail how your company or your customers can use the free online Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Estimator® to more accurately determine the real P&L impact of reshoring or offshoring. Doing so will probably prove that some work should come back.

The mission of the nonprofit Reshoring Initiative is to grow U.S. and North American manufacturing by 40%, eliminating the trade deficit. The objective of this column series is to help you get more than your share of that growth.

Industrial Heating, during a Q&A session at FNA 2020, announced that it will support the Reshoring Initiative with a $2,500 sponsorship. The mission of the Reshoring Initiative is to bring good, well-paying manufacturing jobs back to the United States by assisting companies to more accurately assess their total cost of offshoring and to shift collective thinking from offshoring is cheaper to local reduces the total cost of ownership. As part of this new relationship, the Reshoring Initiative will provide Industrial Heating with editorial content throughout 2021.

We are approaching another election of consequence, but aren’t they all. Regardless of who is elected, our next president and other elected officials have a big job ahead of them.

Airbus, as part of its plan to produce 63 A320 Family aircraft per month in 2021, will expand its industrial footprint in the U.S. by increasing the production rate of A320 family aircraft at its Airbus U.S. Manufacturing Facility in Mobile, Ala., to seven per month by the beginning of next year. This increase will result in 275 jobs added at the facility over the next year. The company will also invest another $40 million through construction of an additional support hangar on the site, bringing its total investment to more than $1 billion in the Gulf Coast city.

An interesting topic for readers is tied to oil-and-gas production. Why? Because U.S. manufacturing companies making metal pipes and materials/machines to produce, transport and process these fossil fuels is a major activity in our world.