An Empirical Study on the Practices of Scm In Automobile Companies: Improving Supply Chain Management Practices in Automobile Companies

Abstract

Automotive industry has hundreds of suppliers and thousands of spareparts units. Due to globalization, the automotive supply chain has beenundergoing tremendous changes and the industry has been exploring innovativemethods to reduce operating cost, lead time and inventory to sustain theirgrowth in the market. With the expansion of sourcing partners, streamlining customerrequirements, inventory management, accurate forecasting, better suppliers‘relation, coordination and co-operation across supply chain, better visibilityand control over the process and reduction of lead time is being achieved bythe organizations. The Indian auto industry is small in size, compared to the worldmarkets ($ 6.73 billion compared to a world market of $737 billion) but hasexperienced a growth rate of 20-25% in the past few years. Despite higher rawmaterial costs, higher energy costs and poorer infrastructure in India,multinational OEMs that have entered the Indian market have managed to producecars that have high local content and are sold at competitive retail prices,largely owing to efficient supply chain.