Collaborative Supplier Integration for Automotive Product Design and Development

It is widely acknowledged that the automotive industry is more than ever obliged to improve its development strategy according to the increasing pressure of product innovation and complexity, the changing market demands and increasing level of customer awareness. Due to the complex development cycle, the automotive OEM has begun to adopt the supplier integration into its product development process. To respond to this trend, the collaboration and partnership management between the automotive OEM and associated suppliers need to be investigated. Regarding the depth of collaboration, the integration of supplier into automotive OEM process chain has been defined in two ways, quasi supplier integration and full supplier integration. To enable the success of supplier integration, this paper has investigated how to control the collaboration between the automotive OEM and its suppliers, through deciding on an appropriate supplier integration way. The collaboration tools enabling supplier integration for automotive development have been proposed. Taking the tool supplier as a case study, a web-based system called "Cyberstamping" has been developed to realize the collaborative supplier integration for automotive product design and development.