Reshoring isn't a hypothetical anymore. The 2024-2026 wave of tariffs, supply-chain disruptions, and "Buy American" procurement preferences pushed roughly 59% of US contract manufacturers into active reshoring conversations with their customers, according to the AMT's 2025 reshoring survey. If you're a procurement lead at an OEM, the question is no longer whether to move production back — it's who can you trust to take the work.
Here's the qualification checklist. Five questions to ask any US precision machining supplier before sending them prints. The right answers separate genuine domestic shops from rebadged broker networks that quietly route work to overseas subtiers.
1. "Where does your raw material come from?"
The single fastest way to detect a re-broker is to ask about raw stock sourcing. A real US shop knows their material suppliers by name — Alro, Castle Metals, Ryerson, ThyssenKrupp Materials. They can tell you the mill cert chain — "this 7075-T6 plate came from Kaiser's plant in Trentwood; here's the cert." A re-broker hedges, says something like "we source from approved suppliers," and gets vague about lot traceability.
For defense work, ask specifically if they maintain a 100% US-domestic raw material supply chain. ITAR compliance and DFARS specialty metals clauses require it. Many shops claim it; fewer can document it.
2. "Show me a recent AS9102 First Article Inspection report — names redacted."
This is the question that separates working shops from PowerPoint shops. A real supplier producing aerospace-class parts in the last 90 days can pull a recent AS9102 FAI with names and customer info redacted and show you Form 1, 2, and 3 — complete, signed, dated. If they can't produce one in the meeting, they aren't doing the work they're claiming to do.
Don't accept "we can do AS9102 if required" — that means they haven't done one recently enough to be operationally fluent. Ask for the document. The willingness to produce it tells you everything.
3. "What's your average lead time, not your best lead time?"
Brochure copy will tell you "1 day to 4 weeks" or some similar wide range that's technically true and operationally meaningless. The real question is what the supplier hits week-over-week on production runs, not what they did on a single rush job in 2023.
K+G's standard lead time is 4-6 weeks, with rush programs available as fast as 1 week. That's the honest number — it means the supplier has capacity, isn't overpromising, and has a real schedule. A shop quoting you 3-day standard lead times on a multi-axis part is either lying or about to default. Operations-aware procurement teams should reward the suppliers who give realistic numbers, not the ones who tell them what they want to hear.
4. "How do you handle a Rev change mid-production?"
This is the configuration-management gotcha. Ask the supplier to walk you through what happens when your engineering team revises a drawing from Rev C to Rev D while their shop is mid-run on a Rev C lot.
Right answer: their ERP flags every open job for that part, freezes Rev C production, generates a deviation notice for any already-completed Rev C parts in queue, requests written customer approval to either scrap-and-restart or ship-with-deviation, and updates the inspection routine to the new revision before any Rev D parts hit the floor. AS9100D requires this configuration management discipline — but many shops claiming AS9100D fall apart in practice.
Wrong answer: "we'd send you an email and figure it out." That's the shop where a Rev C part eventually ends up in a Rev D assembly six months later and someone has to issue a recall.
5. "Who actually does the work — and where?"
This is the broker question, asked plainly. A real shop will tell you exactly which machines run what, which operators they have on staff, and where the physical building sits. A broker will deflect with "we have a partner network" or "we use the right shop for each job."
K+G's two operating shops are Burton Machining (Racine, WI) and Klapperich Tool (Elgin, IL). Both run on the K+G Ai ERP. Both have their own machine lists, operator rosters, and customer-visit policies. You can come walk the floor — and we encourage it for any program over a certain threshold.
A supplier that won't let you walk the floor is hiding something. Maybe it's that the floor isn't where they said. Maybe it's that the floor is 30% the size of their website implies. Either way, that's information.
The cost math (briefly)
The reshoring TCO math has flipped for most procurement categories in the last 24 months. When you actually total up offshore costs — base unit price + freight + customs + tariffs + transit-time inventory carry + quality rework + IP risk + supply-chain disruption insurance — domestic suppliers come in within 5-15% of the all-in offshore cost on most precision machining work. For aerospace, medical, and defense (where AS9100D, ITAR, ISO 13485 are required anyway), domestic is often cheaper on the TCO basis because the regulatory overhead of qualifying an offshore supplier eats the unit-cost savings.
If you're running a 2026 reshoring qualification cycle and want to skip the broker game, send us a print. We'll quote it, show you the routing, name the machines and operators it will run on, and walk you through the cert package. The information you actually need to qualify a supplier is the information we should have been showing you from the start.