Manufacturing Service Providers for Automotive Industry Aiding Focus on Profitable Growth!
Mature demands and constant pricing pressures are triggering automotive manufacturers to reduce costs, ensure good quality and compliance with strict regulations such as TREAD, CAFÉ, and ISO 14000 etc. This increases the demand for precise strategic measures and requires focus not only on revenue drivers but also in augmenting the productivity and operations across global manufacturing networks. Increased pressures to achieve standardized operations across world-over manufacturing networks requires full coordination, inter plant collaboration, intra-plant collaboration and adequate liaison between departments manufacturing services providing companies.
Manufacturing being the core function for any automotive manufacturing unit, peripheral activities like market research, product development, utilities, logistics etc. can be handled by external agencies, aiding bottom line profits. These agencies can be categorized into four broad categories:
Automotive Market Research Companies
Backed with in depth knowledge of the automotive industry, market research companies provide in detail and reliable automotive information, accurate forecasts, actionable research information and recommendations to improve strategic position of the client organization. They offer unique perspectives to standardized approaches on the basis of comprehensive statics and accurate, reliable forecasts.
Product Development Companies
Since the automotive product development processes have become increasingly complex with the need to collaborate tightly across various design disciplines, global scattered design teams, and geographically dispersed manufacturing operations, the involvement of product development company spans across every phase of product development process including ideation, R&D, optimization, testing, pre-production prototyping, production control, post production lifecycle monitoring and support. They help automotive companies meet these challenges head on and enable product development across heterogeneous environments, facilitating design and equipment reuse.
Utilities Management Companies
Business costs to carry out full procurement, audit and management of company’s utility equipments and telecom can be a nightmare to deal with. Companies hire / outsource the trouble area to utility management companies, thus saving time and money. These companies analyze company’s consumption data, detect inefficiencies and procure new energy and consumption contracts to improve accuracy and usefulness of management information on utilities.
Third Party Inspection Companies
Third party or external inspection companies provide a whole range of services from design assessment, examination of raw material, in-process inspection to final inspection. They also ensure that the machining equipments and processes at vendor’s end meet prescribed quality standards. Powered by highly skilled, experienced and qualified inspection engineers, these companies bring along hands on experience in of the best-in-class automotive manufacturing practices.
Logistics Service Providers
The backbone of a functional supply chain system is the efficient and timely logistics of end products. More and more automotive consumers are requesting highly individualized and customized vehicles. The shift in trend raises highly complex modules of supply chain with order/vehicle specific mo being supplied in sequence. As a result, logistics service providers are further in pressures to support lean and fast LSP (Large Supplier Park) operations with towering volumes across numerous commodities.