Most China+1 plans move one layer — final assembly. The other four stay exactly where they were. Print it, tick what you can actually prove, and score your product out of 50.
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The question was never which country to choose. It is which layers of your product can actually leave. Three numbers explain why most relocation plans look finished and feel finished — while the risk stays exactly where it was.
Final assembly and packaging. The only layer most relocation plans actually touch — and the one that decides the least about your exposure.
Materials, tooling, tier-2 components and engineering. Still sourced where they were — still on the same ships, the same molds, the same people.
A longer chain, not a safer one. Two countries to manage, two sets of inventory, one origin story you now have to defend.
Risk travels upward. Move layer 5 while layer 3 fails to supply, and you own an empty plant with a shipping schedule.
Plating, anodising and heat treatment are a one-hour-drive industry in the Pearl River Delta. Elsewhere they are a flight.
The mold can be shipped. The mold shop, the steel grade and the spare parts cannot.
Your new plant can be spotless and still assemble parts that ship from China. That is not a moved supply chain.
Yield lives in people, not in drawings. Why 118 A on that weld, why 210 °C on that die — it is in someone’s hands.
The only layer most companies actually move — and the layer that decides the least about your risk.
Ten boxes per layer. A box only counts if you can show the document behind it. Your score is not an opinion — it is a count.
Genuinely relocatable. Execute in full. Rare in practice: simple products, flat supply base, mature ecosystem.
Move L5. Dual-source L3 and L4. New site 60–70%, China keeps 30–40% as backup and fast-response capacity.
You moved the last process only. Risk has not fallen — it has become dispersed and more expensive.
Deep process dependency. Put the money into second-source qualification and inventory resilience instead.
The combination that decides it: if L1 and L3 score 5 or less while L5 scores 8 or more, your real structure is Chinese sub-assembly, foreign final assembly. That can work — but write it into your origin analysis honestly, hold more buffer stock rather than less, and name the shortage liability in the contract.
Five pages, no theory. Every page is something you can hand to a supplier, a plant manager or your own team.
Five layers, ranked by difficulty, with the one honest test for each.
Materials and special processes; tooling, molds and machinery. Twenty boxes.
Critical components and tier-2; engineering and skilled labour. Twenty boxes.
The last ten boxes, the scoring sheet, and the MOVE / DUAL-SOURCE / STAY matrix.
A ready-to-send RFI, with the one thing to watch in each answer.
The five mistakes that make a relocation plan look finished before it is.
Copy them into a formal RFI and watch how long the first one takes to answer. That tells you more than the answer itself.
Full BOM, including tier-2 supplier names and plant cities.Watch for · speed of reply
Which parts are single-source? What is the alternative model?Watch for · a real alternative, or a guess
Can we enter your plant unannounced within 2 hours — in writing?Watch for · the one they cannot bluff
One PDF. Five pages. Fifty boxes. It takes about twenty minutes and it will tell you whether the move is real — or whether you are about to build a second plant around the same supply chain.
A4, print-ready. English. Includes the 50-point checklist, the scoring sheet, the decision matrix and the 12-question supplier RFI.
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