How automotive manufacturers and suppliers create efficient inbound supply chains.

How automotive manufacturers and suppliers create efficient inbound supply chains.

Facility selection

Sourcing decisions are some of the most vital ones automotive manufacturers face. This challenge is often referred to as the “off-shore vs. near-shore” or “low-cost vs. local” question. By using modeling technology, companies can make supplier and manufacturing location decisions that are optimized across the entire supply chain, identifying the tradeoffs across all the different cost elements.

Transportation route optimization

can be done alone or in conjunction with either supply chain optimization or simulation. Using advanced algorithms, transportation routes are defined to minimize the cost of inbound shipments, while considering realistic cost and constraint structures. This helps answer the questions, “What’s going to happen to our transportation routes when the network design is changed?” or “Could there be a more efficient way to get our product from the supplier to production?”

Product flow-path optimization

The process of moving products from the supply through production and eventually distribution presents myriad choices. The collective set of these choices make up a product’s flow-path through the supply chain. Modeling all the alternative flow options and using smart algorithms to determine the best choices takes the guesswork out of these decisions and provides a useful reference in boardroom discussions.

Consolidation center selection and analysis

For a company with multiple suppliers making different products in a relatively small area, a consolidation center (CC) may be used to combine smaller shipments for fewer larger shipments and reduced transport costs. Flow path optimization can identify which products/suppliers should go to a CC, and network optimization can recommend where and how many CCs may be needed.