Page 42 - MetalForming April 2014

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diminishing safety stock and face longer delays in 2014. Con- sideration of suppliers’ capability and aligning longer-term requirements is vital to avoid jeopardized production.”
These and other topics will resound at PMA’s APSC meet- ing later this month. On the agenda:
• Sheri E. Hickok, global purchasing and supply chain, General Motors, who presents the keynote address
• Joe Langley, principal analyst, HIS, who presents The State of the Automotive Industry: The Global Outlook
• Dan Sharkey, partner, Brooks Wilkins Sharkey & Turco PLLC, who will offer his always insightful and interesting Legal Briefing for automotive suppliers
Learn more and register to attend this important event, slated for Novi, MI, at www.pma.org/apsc.
Lastbutnotleast,WomeninManufacturing(WiM)andthe Automotive Womens Alliance Foundation (AWAF) jointly will host the 3rd annual Women in Automotive program, collocated with the APSC meeting. It kicks off April 30 at noon; separate registration is required at www.womeninmanufacturing.org.
Working Through the Challenges
(Reprinted with permission from the January 2014 issue of Automotive Supply Chain magazine)
Multiple, simultaneous vehicle launches and the pipelin- ing of hot sellers create manufacturing capacity challenges, but the supply base is highly resilient says Chrysler’s Sig Huber. He spoke with Sam Ogle.
The automotive market in the United States is enjoying a period of unforeseen growth following the despondency created by the 2008/2009 recession. Analysts are already predicting a return to pre-downturn sales levels within the next two years. Every silver lining has a cloud, of course, and there have been reports of capacity shortages in the manu- facturing supply base. Sig Huber, director of supplier relations at Chrysler Group LLC, believes that the challenge has not been insurmountable.
“One thing we have learned in recent years is that the sup- ply base is very resilient,” he says. “We have seen this as a result of the bankruptcies in 2008 and 2009 and the Japanese tsunami and other natural disasters. The supply chain has shown an ability to be very flexible. We have been chal- lenged with capacity over the past year and a half and we have been spending quite a bit of time working with our suppliers on the issues.”
The industry is seeing a plethora of new model launches and these, says Huber, are creating capacity challenges, as is the tendency for OEMs to fill their dealer pipelines with “hot” vehicles for which consumer demand is high. Even if a supplier has planned well it can reach a point where several of its customers are asking for more and more components and the supplier only has so much capacity.
“We have had a few issues where suppliers were a little slow to make capital investment, not believing that the vol- umes were going to recover as strongly as they have,” says Huber. “By and large, the supply base has been able to work
40 MetalForming/April 2014
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The Automotive Uptick