Global Location Strategies
Assembly Line
How America’s Factory Whisperer Chooses the Perfect Location
The job is a blend of data-crunching, on-the-ground investigation and hard-nose negotiating. Caldwell figures there are around 850 distinct data points that can sway a siting decision. Transportation, housing, quality of life, cost of living, utility rates — it’s all relevant, as are the nitty-gritty details of the site itself — its size, shape and location, and what’s in the water, soil and natural habitats.
Caldwell and her staff of 17 are constantly hunting for a site’s “fatal flaw.” How hard is it to get permits from various layers of local government? How much electricity, sewer, water and natural gas can be piped into a site? What’s the local labor force like now, and how might it look in 20 years when the facility will presumably still be operating? Is the region a place you’d actually want to be, where your most valuable employees would be willing to relocate?
Each visit to a potential site is an all-day marathon of meetings on crucial details from utility connections and transportation logistics to construction and labor costs — plus chats with a succession of officials at various levels of government.
Caldwell explained her view of the global competitive landscape to 20 local economic development officials dining on steak and salmon. “What I hear all the time is how much cheaper China is than the US. It’s not,” she said, showing them a PowerPoint slide ranking more than 30 countries on their estimated operating costs including labor, electricity, water and transportation. The US landed in the middle, only slightly more expensive than China.