OEMs demand flawless program launches. To be successful in today’s marketplace, automotive suppliers must be able to interact with and manage multiple customers, partners and programs while making certain that each program launches flawlessly. Failure to meet quality, performance, cost and timing requirements is not an option. Automotive suppliers must collaborate effectively in all stages of a program to avoid absorbing costs associated with fixing last-minute launch or warranty problems. This requirement becomes especially important as you are faced with managing an ever-increasing number of programs.

Change is a way of life in the automotive industry. The supplier’s challenge is to manage change in such a way that every change is quoted quickly and accurately – and with a level of traceability that mitigates risk without crippling innovation. To ensure program profitability, the automotive supplier’s own supply chain can be crucial to delivering accurate request for quote (RFQ) responses to customers.

Workplace attrition can place any company’s intellectual assets in jeopardy. Automotive suppliers are challenged to capture and protect their company’s collective knowledge gleaned from experience and practice. This knowledge must be made available to the rest of the organization so it can be re-used on new products, new programs and new customers.

Siemens PLM Software offers a collaborative decision support platform for systems-driven product development to provide cross-functional knowledge sharing and more collaborative decisions, while understanding how the decisions you make impact others throughout the value chain as well as your bottom line. The results are smarter decisions that help you build the right product and build the product right.

With Siemens PLM Software’s solutions for automotive product development, manufacturing and supply chain collaboration, you can excel in today’s globally dispersed business environment:

• Achieve end-to-end lifecycle integration ensuring that everyone across the value chain can get the right information when they need it to create a product that best meets customer requirements
• Provide design-to-manufacturing support for new materials in support of weight reduction initiatives
• Optimize your own business processes while still supporting your customers’ individual information exchange, synchronization and interoperability needs
• Capture your product and process knowledge and proactively facilitate its re-use on every new design to save costs, improve quality and productivity, and effectively manage your company’s intellectual assets
• Improve collaboration with, and management of, your own automotive supply chain to realize reductions in sourcing cycle time and traceability of awards and changes