Accelerating supply chain planning in the automotive industry

Rocky roads or smooth sailing? Amid ongoing supply chain disruptions, automotive aftermarket suppliers are operating under a new set of rules.

The aftermarket supply chain sometimes struggles to manage a variety of parts, varying demand patterns, large numbers of vendors, inefficient legacy systems, and third parties to coordinate effective distribution. Some trends reshaping planning in the automotive supply chain include:

• Long product support with a baseline forecast for demand profiling, based on a seasonal/non-seasonal item across the network
• Introduction of new product categories to support vehicle electrification, connectivity, and autonomy
• Fast innovators bringing products to market quickly and proactively to balance product flow and costs throughout a product’s life cycle
• The need for better forecast accuracy to identify customer order trends and improve near-term forecasting
• Improved upstream supply chain processes that improve supplier qualification / reduce supplier variability