Open Access

Rushikesh Dattatraya Kendre

• The global automotive industry is undergoing a major shift from the combustion engines to a wide variety of propulsion technologies. It is further pooled with Industry 4.0, which has lead to a large volatility in technolgical innovations and ambiguity in the product life cycles. This uncertainty has lead to a rapidly changing demands for the existing products and services. It is causing difficulty in planning yearly demand quantities with suppliers. In many cases, tier-1 suppliers are unable to actually purchase the quantities for which they reserve a particular capacity of its sub-suppliers during annual sourcing agreements. Companies need to improve their flexibility to adapt to such unpredictable market situations by preparing for quantity or product changes. Before setting a target for a desired flexibility level, the exisiting situation should be assessed. Therefore, this thesis aims to develop a method to assess the flexibility of suppliers in terms of product mix, volume deviations and delivery compliance. A quantification model is derived, which will be applicable for a wide range of suppliers. The model will enable the comparison of different suppliers during new sourcing decisions, as well as the identifcation of the exisiting suppliers that have room for improvement. Various factors that affect supplier flexibility are identified through literarure research and personal interviews with different employees having supplier specific roles within Rober Bosch GmbH. These factors are analysed through a ‘WHAT-WHY-HOW’ analysis and only those factors are considered which can be coherently quantified. Based on their significance in the overall flexibility, these focus factors are given particular weightages and then quantified for each suppliers using the available data. The resultant of the scored factors will yield a number that indicates the flexibility index for a corresponding supplier. The developed model will be tested using Robert Bosch GmbH as an example.