“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”
This Darwinian idea about adaptability extends far beyond biology—it mirrors how organisations navigate disruption today. As global conditions shift, resilience increasingly depends on reassessing where and how operations run. Strategic relocation is emerging as a proactive response to geopolitical risk, compliance pressure, and sustainability goals. With IWMS software serving as the digital backbone, organisations can manage these transitions with greater clarity, speed, and control.
Strategic Portfolio Relocation: A Changing Landscape
In today’s global environment, organisations are rethinking where and how they operate. Strategic portfolio relocation refers to the deliberate repositioning of business operations, facilities, and supply chains to better align with evolving geopolitical, economic, and regulatory conditions. The following key types of strategic relocation can be defined:
- Offshoring: Moving operations to lower-cost countries, often for labor or production savings.
- Nearshoring: Relocating operations to neighboring countries to reduce logistical complexity and improve responsiveness.
- Reshoring: Bringing operations back to the home country to reduce risk and improve control.
- Friendshoring: Shifting operations to politically aligned countries to enhance stability and compliance.
While offshoring dominated the past few decades, the tide is turning, with reshoring and friendshoring now coming towards the forefront of strategic decision-making—driven by geopolitical instability, trade and tariff shifts, compliance pressures, sustainability goals, and technological advancements.
These strategies are no longer just reactive—they’re proactive moves to build resilience, agility, and long-term value.
Why Manufacturers Are Embracing Reshoring
Reshoring isn’t a distant ambition anymore, it’s a tactical response to global instability. Across the US, UK, and EU, manufacturers are actively relocating operations closer to home.
The goal?
Reduce exposure, stay compliant, and meet regional demands for speed, sustainability, and resilience.
Verdantix’s Reshoring in 2025 webinar highlights five key drivers:
- Tariffs & Trade Policy: Frameworks like USMCA and CBAM are reshaping cost structures and market access.
- Geopolitical Instability: Conflicts in Ukraine, tensions in Taiwan, and disruptions in the Red Sea are exposing vulnerabilities.
- Compliance Pressures: Laws such as the UFLPA and the EU Forced Labour Regulation demand greater supply chain transparency.
- Cost Volatility: Fluctuations in shipping, energy, and labor costs are making offshore operations less predictable.
- Technology & Automation: Advances in robotics, AI, and IWMS are making local production more viable and efficient.
In short, reshoring is emerging as a proactive strategy to build resilience, ensure compliance, and meet the growing demand for sustainable, responsive manufacturing.
“Reshoring is moving from a long-term aspiration to a near-term imperative.”
— Verdantix, Reshoring in 2025: How Leaders Are Turning Disruption Into Opportunity
Friendshoring: A Strategic Extension of Reshoring
In addition to reshoring, manufacturers are increasingly adopting friendshoring; a strategy that shifts supply chains to politically aligned countries. As highlighted in KPMG’s Top Geopolitical Risks 2025, friendshoring helps mitigate exposure to trade disruptions and regulatory fragmentation by anchoring operations in trusted regions. This approach is especially relevant in sectors like semiconductors, EVs, and pharmaceuticals, where national security and compliance pressures are high. Friendshoring complements reshoring by offering a more flexible, alliance-driven path to resilience and operational continuity.
IWMS: The Backbone of Smarter Portfolio Relocation
Reshoring and friendshoring aren’t just about changing locations—they’re strategic transformations that require precision, agility, and full visibility across the built environment. To navigate these shifts successfully, organisations need a digital backbone that connects the dots between real estate, workplace, asset, and sustainability operations.
That’s where an Integrated Workplace Management System (IWMS) like Planon comes in. Planon’s IWMS solution provides a unified platform that empowers manufacturers to:
- Make smarter, data-driven decisions
- Accelerate execution of relocation strategies
- Maintain compliance and continuity across regions
Whether you're consolidating sites, onboarding teams, or navigating new ESG mandates, IWMS supports every step of the strategic journey.
Within Planon’s IWMS, four core domains play a pivotal role in enabling smarter, faster, and more resilient relocation strategies:
- Real Estate Management (REM) – Optimise portfolio planning, site consolidation, and capital budgeting
- Space & Workplace Services Management (SWSM) – Streamline onboarding, hybrid work, and space utilisation
- Asset & Maintenance Management (AMM) – Ensure uptime, extend asset life, and maintain compliance
- Energy & Sustainability Management (ESM) – Track emissions, meet ESG mandates, and improve circularity
Each of these domains contribute to a cohesive strategic organisational transformation—one that’s not only operationally sound but also future-proof.
Improve Real Estate Efficiency with Strategic Planning & Budget Control
Reshoring often means rethinking your real estate setup, by consolidating sites, investing in new ones, and aligning with long-term goals.
Planon’s Real Estate Management (REM) solution enables:
- Centralised portfolio planning to evaluate future space needs and assess site consolidation opportunities
- Lease term optimisation and cost reduction
- Real estate strategy alignment with business goals
- Financial performance tracking and TCO insights
- Capital budget management across construction, refurbishment, and relocation
- Streamlined acquisition and release of space with transaction plans that consolidate requests, compare broker bids, and support cost-effective reshoring decisions
Planon’s Real Estate Management solution empowers organisations to make informed, portfolio-level decisions that support reshoring strategies. By combining centralised data, financial insights, and scenario-based planning, it enables businesses to optimise their real estate footprint, reduce costs, and align accommodation strategies with long-term operational goals.
Speed up Onboarding and Optimise Space with SWSM
Reshoring isn’t just about buildings; it’s about people.
Planon’s Space & Workplace Services Management (SWSM) helps create flexible, engaging workplaces that support onboarding and daily operations:
- Simulate and assign personnel to spaces or desks
- Enable hybrid work and desk-level planning
- Match cleaning, catering, and maintenance to actual demand
- Integrate HVAC and lighting systems to reduce energy use
- Use IoT-powered Workplace Insights to detect no-shows and auto-release unused bookings
- Strategic Space Planning with scenario simulations, interdepartmental dependencies, and nearness KPIs to support reshoring-driven accommodation planning
SWSM consolidates space data across the portfolio, enabling benchmarking, reconfiguration, and right-sising based on actual usage. Mobile booking, issue reporting, and visitor management are supported via the Planon Workplace App.
Maximise Uptime with Asset & Maintenance Management
Legacy systems and reactive maintenance can slow reshoring down.
Planon’s Asset & Maintenance Management (AMM) solution helps:
- Aggregate and monitor asset data in one place
- Standardise workflows and automate repetitive tasks
- Enable mobile access to work orders and asset history
- Link maintenance strategy to real estate goals, in order for maintenance activities to be aligned with asset goals
- Extend asset lifespan and reduce downtime
- Ensure health & safety compliance, manage asset compliance and maintain regulatory readiness
These capabilities support operational continuity and cost control, which are critical when scaling domestic production.
Stay Compliant with ESG & Risk Management Tools
Relocation introduces new compliance challenges, ranging from forced labor bans to carbon reporting.
Planon’s Energy & Sustainability Management (ESM) solution helps:
- Capture and digitise energy, water, and waste data
- Automate emissions calculations and carbon reporting
- Monitor performance across building portfolios
- Set and track sustainability goals
- Maintain audit trails and simplify ESG disclosures
- Support sustainable reporting initiatives like CSRD & EU taxonomy
- Evaluate and improve building circularity with Building Circularity Insights to reduce polluting material usage and CO₂ impact of the property portfolio
These tools help organisations stay compliant while building trust with stakeholders and customers.
Why Planon?
Planon empowers organisations to:
- Reduce costs across facilities and assets
- Accelerate onboarding and space transitions
- Ensure compliance with evolving ESG mandates
- Future-proof operations with scalable, integrated software
- Leverage connected portfolio intelligence to unify real-time data, AI-powered analytics, and IoT insights, enabling smarter decisions across real estate, workplace, and asset strategies
Whether you’re relocating select product lines or scaling full domestic production, Planon’s IWMS helps you act with confidence, agility, and insight.
Ready to Relocate Smarter? If your organisation is exploring reshoring, friendshoring or any other type of portfolio relocation, now’s the time to rethink your facility and workplace strategy. Planon’s IWMS is built to support the shift across real estate, ESG, maintenance, and workplace services.
Contact us to learn more: Request your personalised demo of Planon
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