Supplier management

During last week I and three very senior colleagues had an interesting e-mail discussion with regards to supplier management. Our discussion started off as a simple question related to automotive where constant improvements are made and there is a constant drift towards more proactive OEM-engineering. The question was how supplier management is affected and whether or not it is taken care of properly. Think e.g. of the difference in degrees of innovative freedom between a ”build to print” supplier and a strategic partner.

If we are doing more and more model-based development with early verification etc are we reducing the suppliers to more and more ”b-to-p” or shall we involve them even earlier? There are a lot of options with different implications; the main point is that we should make a conscious choice.

Personally I think this dynamic is really interesting and sometimes I think it is not discussed (or planned for) enough and becomes more a happening based on purchase-model.

Well the mail-dialog ended up in some really good reflections and statements, if someone is interested I think Dennis should sum them up in a presentation since the subject is too big to just fire away in a short blog-post.

Or maybe you have some good ideas and will be the second one who dares to comment on this blog? Would be huge.

No more procrastination, time to get that report on xtUML and MDA going.