AUTOMOTIVE

The automotive sector went through a rough economic situation, which strongly modified its frame of action. The globalization propitiated a strong growth of new markets, such as India, China, Russia or Eastern Europe, caused by the presence of a strong demand and foreign investments. These young economies are increasing their world-wide market share, while the traditional automobile manufacturing companies are having some problems in confronting new competitors: the average EBIT margin in the last years was 4.5%, much lower if compared to other sectors of the manufacturing industry.

The main problems pointed out by the original equipment manufacturers (OEM) are a lower-than-foreseen sales volume, higher material costs, increasing costs of marketing campaigns, and delays in new products (time-to-market). On the other hand, the original equipment suppliers (OES) are putting the emphasis on problems concerning the management of the relations with manufacturers and the development of an efficient supply chain management (SCM).

Knowledge is becoming one of the key aspects for managing this change and allows the companies to generate the necessary innovation, identified as the driving force for survival. But naturally, innovation is linked to the flexibility of the business model, which can be developed only applying a firm discipline and a very strong business leadership.

Thanks to the experience in international projects gathered over the last years, SINERIA can offer all the required know-how and support, as well as a collection of ruling principles and methodologies (SINERIA4AUTO) along the whole automobile value chain, in order to:

• Create and organize a new, flexible, and successful automobile company, or introducing a project change based upon a preliminary strong costs reduction project (cost calculation).
• Manage the product portfolio, the data lifecycle, and the product quality to considerably reduce time-to-market.
• Manage the company’s Operations and splitting the company’s activity into its components to act as an aggregation for smaller companies, thus to simplify the activity-based cost control process.
• Specialize the company, with a focus on its main advantages, and relying on the strategic and business partners for closing gaps and getting the opportunity of exploiting new areas.
• Simplify the search for business opportunities, thus to make their management simpler and easier.
• Unify the interactions between people, processes, and technology in the company.

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