For the first time in more than four years, the numbers are telling manufacturers something they haven't heard in a long time: momentum is building again. The Institute for Supply Management's (ISM) Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index registered 55.6% in July, its highest reading since May 2022. A gauge of manufacturing activity, the index signals expansion above 50, and July marked the seventh consecutive month of growth. The employment index moved into expansion territory for the first time in nearly three years, with 60% of survey panelists reporting they are hiring.
Production is coming back. Hiring is improving. U.S. plants are being asked to produce more capacity, some through new investment and some by pushing existing lines harder. Several automakers, for example, are expanding their U.S. production, citing tariffs on foreign-built vehicles as a factor. In a move expected to create thousands of U.S. jobs, Ford plans to shift more of its Lincoln production stateside.
The interesting question isn't whether reshoring is happening. It clearly is. It’s whether the factory floors receiving all this work are ready to handle it.
Volume Hides Failure; Utilization Exposes It
The ISM's July report showed inventories ticking downward even as four of the five core subindexes grew. The data points to plants running leaner as activity picks up, with less operational slack in the system. That may be good for top-line revenue, but can be brutal for equipment health.
When plant utilization surges, three operational vulnerabilities can quickly surface:
- Accelerated asset wear: A line that performed fine at moderate utilization for years can behave very differently under sustained higher throughput. Wear patterns that were manageable at two shifts a day can turn into failure points at three.
- Exposed maintenance backlogs: At lower utilization, a deferred repair or an aging component often has enough slack in the schedule to go unnoticed. Add volume, and that same gap turns into unplanned downtime at the worst possible moment.
- The erosion of tribal knowledge. The employment index moving into expansion territory is good news. Still, the hiring also means a wave of technicians and operators who haven't yet developed the instincts a veteran builds over years. The ability to hear a bearing start to go or notice a motor running a few degrees warmer than it should. That knowledge has to live somewhere other than in one person's head. It has to live in a system.
Put together, the plant that worked fine yesterday is not guaranteed to work fine at the pace it's about to be asked to run.
Tariffs Shifts the Cost of Failure
As trade policy may help shift some production back to domestic facilities, it simultaneously raises the stakes for internal operations. Tariffs and supply-chain volatility are making equipment, components, and replacement parts more expensive and less predictable to source. More pressure on existing assets, combined with higher repair and replacement costs, makes reliability matter more, not less.
That changes the economics of maintenance. When replacing an asset, motor, or critical component becomes more expensive or takes longer, the value of extending its useful life rises. So does the value of catching a failure early, carrying the right critical spares, and knowing which assets represent the greatest operational risk. What once looked like routine maintenance decisions increasingly becomes a question of capital allocation and business continuity.
Where Plant Leaders Should Be Focused—Right Now
Absorbing this growth requires moving past reactive maintenance. Plant leaders navigating this ramp-up should focus on six core priorities:
- Understand asset conditions before pushing utilization higher. Get a real picture of where every critical asset stands, not a maintenance log from 2019 or tribal knowledge that walks out the door when a veteran technician retires. This is really a question of where your organization sits on the maintenance maturity model, the spectrum that runs from reactive firefighting to preventive, predictive, and eventually prescriptive maintenance.
- Extend the useful life of existing assets. Reshoring doesn't always mean new equipment. Often it means asking older equipment to do more, which makes a disciplined life-extension strategy as valuable as any capital project.
- Prioritize preventive maintenance around your most critical equipment first. Not every asset deserves the same attention. Rank equipment by its impact on production, safety, quality, and replacement lead time. Then put the most critical assets that would actually stop production if they failed on the tightest PM schedules and the closest monitoring.
- Get more disciplined about spare parts strategy. Longer lead times and pricier components mean the cost of being unprepared for a failure is higher than it used to be.
- Preserve maintenance knowledge as hiring accelerates. Build the judgment your best technicians have developed into documented procedures and workflows, so it doesn't leave when they do.
- Use maintenance history to decide where capital truly needs to go. Data on what's failing, what's aging, and what's at risk should drive investment decisions, not the other way around.
Reliability Is the Reshoring Story Nobody's Telling
The headlines will keep covering PMI readings and reshoring announcements, and they should. Those are the macro signals that tell us where the sector is headed. But the companies that actually capture the upside of this moment will be the ones whose plant floors can absorb the growth without breaking.
Trade policy may determine where production moves. Reliability will determine who can actually profit from that shift.
Gary Specter is the CEO of Limble.Limble
Most recently, he served as CEO of Simpro Group, where he led the company through significant growth, operational transformation, and global expansion. Prior to Simpro, Specter was President of Cart.com and held senior leadership roles at Adobe, Magento, NetSuite, IBM, and Baynote, leading large-scale sales, growth, and customer success organizations worldwide.
