I started my career in manufacturing, so that’s just one reason I’m interested in the topics of offshoring (sending manufacturing work overseas) and what’s now called “reshoring,” or bringing jobs and factories back to the U.S.

Somebody at A.T. Kearney sent me a link to their recent report on reshoring, with the headline:

Reshoring in Reverse Again
US manufacturers are not exactly coming back in droves. In fact, the 2018 Reshoring Index shows that imports from traditional offshoring countries are at a record high.

When you learn to look at data and workplace metrics through the “Process Behavior Chart” methodology, you learn to be skeptical of text descriptions like “a record high.” Does “a record high” mean that the data point is statistically meaningful? Not always.