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In supply chain management (SCM), product classification and demand forecasting are crucial pillars to ensure companies to have production in the right category and quantity for long-term profitability. Due to COVID-19 from 2019, the automobile industry has been seriously negatively affected as the demand dropped dramatically. Therefore, it is necessary to make reasonable product classification and accurate demand forecasting to facilitate automobile companies in SCM to reduce unpopular product manufacture and unnecessary storage costs. In this paper, the Canada automobile market has been chosen with the period from 1946 to 2022. To classify a number of different types of motor vehicles into several categories with general characteristics, K-means Clustering method is applied. With the seasonal patterns and random generated features for auto sales, the time series models ARIMA and SARIMA are adopted for demand forecasting. According to the analysis, the automobiles fitting in the category with high demand and low price are valuable for further production. In addition, SARIMA Model is more accurate and fits better than ARIMA Model for both the training and test datasets for long-term prediction. The classification and forecasting results shed light on guiding manufacturers to adjust production schemes and ensuring auto dealers to predict more accurate sales in order to optimize the strategic planning. © 2023 SPIE.
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In the post-covid world, governments explore options to enhance their policies so that corporations can act as successful motors of recovery and sustainable growth. Countries select various objectives related to global value chains (GVC), such as participation, value capture, inclusiveness and resilience, yet might be unaware of the position of corporations they are supposed to motivate. In this paper, we aim to (re-)investigate the position of Visegrad Four (V4) suppliers within the regional automotive value chains and to compare results with suppliers in other EU member states using the trade in value added (TiVA) statistics. We set two research questions: How does the position of V4 in automotive GVCs differ from the positions of other EU member states and significant other automotive-producing countries? What is the link between the domestic value added in gross exports of final automotive products and the selected policy variables? A multiple linear regression model is run with TiVA in the automotive industry as the dependent variable and independent variables embodying proxies of GVC-oriented policy consequences. The analysis identifies significant differences in value-added levels between V4 countries and other EU countries, and other large automotive-producing economies. Labour costs, productivity, investment in R&D and innovation support are among the factors where V4 countries fall behind. Implications for Central European audience: The results of our research might be helpful for respective authorities and governments in V4 and other Central and Eastern European countries. They can be of use when setting goals and implementing policies targeted at promoting innovation, upgrading within existing GVCs and in cooperation between universities and research centres on the one hand and the automotive industry on the other. © 2023, Central European Business Review. All Rights Reserved.
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Social distancing requirements urged by the COVID-19 pandemic along with high transportation cost reduced inperson meetings significantly in recent times. In consequence, many people are seeking for virtual reality (VR) to feel a similar experiences of visiting and enjoying places that are unaccessible. VR has immense success in domains, such as automotive industry, healthcare, tourism, entertainment, sports etc. It is observed that traditional online synchronous and asynchronous class structure is not quite effective in engaging students in class participation and discussion. Therefore, we introduce a novel VRbased class structure that will simulate the classroom environment for students participating a class virtually. We equipped the classroom with several internet of things (IoT) devices that collects information from the classroom, analyze those information, and determine some interesting information to display for the students participating the class virtually. We design a classroom prototype and validate the prototype with simulation. The result of the simulation shows that such a VR-based classroom model is feasible and can introduce in classrooms. © 2023 IEEE.
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This paper explores the COVID-era government stimulus programs for the automotive industry in France and Germany. We assess the design of the sectoral support packages and the related policymaking processes against the background of the discourse about crisis-era state aid as an instrument of economic restructuring. We place the sectoral stimulus programs in the context of changing EU-level regulations and the following three country-level characteristics: the revival of industrial policy thinking among national policymakers;the growing economic pressures in the domestic automotive sectors;and the established structures of government-industry interest intermediation. Our results suggest that in both countries, large and technologically transformative recovery programs were introduced for the automotive sector. However, both support packages had a rather structurally conservative character and were influenced by different pre-existing state-industry dynamics: the corporatist concertation in Germany and post-dirigiste state interventionism in France.
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Since it has been established that supply chain management has traditionally been a process-oriented field with not much focus on innovation, in a post-pandemic world, engineering managers have realized that research is needed to identify which aspects of global supply chain management have the greatest need for transformation and could benefit most through the application of entrepreneurial competencies. Along those lines, the authors of this paper have earlier proposed a research model, which includes a mapping between supply chain management process steps and entrepreneurial competencies along with proposed training and organizational changes to facilitate the implementation of a more entrepreneurial approach to supply chain management processes. Using a qualitative, grounded theory approach based on two case studies, the authors focus on two industries. The differences and similarities between the two industries will be compared in this paper;thus, showing engineering managers how the model could be applied to the two different industries considered in this paper. Copyright, American Society for Engineering Management, 2022.
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PurposeThe main objective of this study is to analyze content posted by automotive sector brands on their YouTube channels, identifying the use of a branded content format, the application of insights to creative conceptualization and the dissemination of messages related to messages' environmental commitment.Design/methodology/approachA descriptive study was conducted using qualitative content analysis as the methodological approach. The sample is made up of 691 videos posted on YouTube from September 2020 to August 2021 by the ten automotive brands with the biggest advertising budgets in Spain (InfoAdex, 2021).FindingsThe findings reveal a predominance of the advertorial format in content posted on YouTube by automotive sector brands, while the branded content format is less popular. Creative concepts based on insights are rare and limited to videos with an advertisement format. The theme of respect for the environment is used mainly in connection with the discourse on vehicle features and not so much as a commitment by the brand in response to consumer concerns or the changes that the automotive sector is undergoing.Originality/valueThe originality of the study lies in the approach it takes to content posted by automotive brands on YouTube. The paper's contribution is innovative in that the study monitors posts by brands in the sample on YouTube over the course of a year, rather than just during the specific periods when these brands run advertising campaigns.
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In addition to equipment maintenance decisions, spare parts ordering decisions from different suppliers play a key role in reducing related costs (e.g., maintenance, inventory and ordering costs). Since suppliers may use different production technologies and materials, spare parts (or products) from different suppliers can be different in quality. Nevertheless, in recent studies, the quality of spare parts is rarely considered to incorporate both equipment maintenance and spare parts ordering. In this paper, we investigate the joint optimization of condition-based maintenance and spare parts provisioning policy under two suppliers with different product quality. We formulate a sequential-decision problem with a Markov decision process and consequently obtain an optimal maintenance and ordering policy by an exact value iteration algorithm. To improve computation efficiency, based on the principle of sequential optimization, we develop heuristic methods. Extensive numerical experiments are conducted to assess the overall performance of the developed heuristic methods. Compared to the optimal method, results showed that the average cost gap is about 2% and computation time is reduced by 94% on average under the proposed heuristic method. Note to Practitioners—This paper is motivated by the observation that automobile industries tried to integrate emergency suppliers from which spare parts have different quality into maintenance schedules to avoid stockout and reduce equipment failure during the Covid-19 pandemic. Specifically, the article focuses on balancing the trade-offs between condition-based maintenance and inventory management from two suppliers with different lead times and spare parts quality for multi-unit systems. On the one hand, effective maintenance scheduling relies on spare parts for replacement to ensure the stability of production. On the other hand, inventory management needs to select the supplier with appropriate lead time and product quality to reduce the ordering cost and avoid stockout based on the degradation states of equipment. The joint optimization of these two aspects serves to reduce the total maintenance and ordering cost. Nevertheless, most existing research aims to optimize them separately. In this paper, we formulate the joint decision problem considering the two aspects based on a Markov decision process. We obtain an optimal maintenance and ordering policy by an exact value iteration algorithm and present heuristics to improve the computation efficiency when the system contains multiple machines. Practitioners can implement the proposed methodology to make condition-based maintenance and inventory management when spare parts with different qualities are ordered from two suppliers. To balance cost and computational efficiency, it is suggested to implement the optimal policy by an exact value iteration algorithm when the number of machines is small in the system and use the heuristic methods when the number of machines is large (i.e., usually larger than 3). IEEE
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The automotive industry's performance in Mexico was affected by the health and economic SARS-CoV2-crisis. As part of the complex North American supply chain, several factors influenced decision-making on crisis management. We determined the multilevel governance mechanisms to characterise the process of implementing activities. The productive performance of the industry, capacity utilisation rate per plant, employment, and foreign direct investment were evaluated. The federal government's support was scarce, although subnational governments were more sensitive to cooperate with stakeholders. Companies had to adapt to pandemic conditions and also to changes in the political and institutional environment driven by the USMCA and tensions between the USA and China. As a result, inward FDI flows and nearshoring practices are growing in the northern Mexican regions, stabilising the supply chains.
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Today, industrial digitalization and Industry 4.0 play an extremely important role as an innovation orientation for automotive manufacturing companies. This trend has only been reinforced by the COVID pandemic. Hungarian industrial players have an essential interest to reach a high level of development in keeping with the era and to be at the forefront of digitalization. However, the previous studies of the authors have shown that Hungarian SMEs, especially domestically owned ones, have encountered significant difficulties in this development path. In this paper, these reasons are explored by analyzing the views of automotive maintenance professionals using different methods. © 2022 IEEE.
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In the actual worldwide context of manufacturing, the capacity to introduce, adapt and produce a new product quickly represents an important strategic objective. This is also a remarkable challenge for the managers, specifically due to the instability in demand and supply. COVID -19 and Russia-Ukraine war have amplified this instability. The flexibility in several parts of a manufacturing system is one of the main pillars of industry 4.0 and could be a great initiative to be investigated. However, there are several types of flexibility, and prioritizing them remains a difficult decision. The definition of several types of flexibility, the opportunity offered by each one, the complexity to implement them, and the way to evaluate their levels are not well developed in the literature. This paper proposes several types of flexibility, the challenges, and some key indicators to measure them. Then a model to identify the appropriate flexibility is proposed. To illustrate the complexity of the problem, a use case of launching a new product in the automotive industry is presented and the necessity to identify the appropriate flexibilities is discussed. © 2022 IEEE.
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In 2020, the World Health Organization announced the global COVID-19 pandemic, which was followed by unprecedented constraints on society and the economy. The restrictions imposed had an impact on the transformation in industry and services sectors. The pandemic, however, affected particular industry sections and types of services to a different degree. Overall, the industry sector is assumed to have been less affected by the crisis, because the government restrictions did not embrace industrial production for the most part. Services faced a different situation;some of them were not provided due to top-down decisions. Therefore, the vulnerability of industry and services to such a strong external impact varies. The article aims to identify the degree and trends in changes in industry and services sectors during the COVID-19 pandemic and to determine the regularities stemming from a different degree of vulnerability of both sectors to such a powerful external stimulus. The study examines changes occurring in different industries and types of services (by the Polish Classification of Economic Activity/NACE 2.0) by way of statistical indicator analysis and using Statistics Poland and Eurostat data. The conducted analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic influence on the industry and services sector leads to the conclusions that its impact on the industry sector was very time-limited-a sharp fall in gross value added in industry occurred mainly in the second quarter of 2020. The pandemic had a modest effect on industry employment, primarily as a result of anti-crisis shields and the will to maintain the potential of labour resources. In the services sector, accommodation and food services suffered the most. The significant falls were noted in the transport section as well as cultural, sports and personal services. Business services which were transferred to the Internet and were provided online ended up the most resilient. The ultimate winner of the pandemic is ICT services, especially electronic ones, which have replaced, wherever possible, traditional types of services.
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This work aims to present the elements related to production and logistics that companies have used in the last four years and that can lead managers to a correct decision in times of uncertainty based on the literature review. During the pandemic caused by COVID-19, industrial companies in the automotive sector had to adapt to the sharp drop in demand, varying negatively by up to 40% from March to November 2020. As of December 2020, demand increased again, recovering the fall from the pandemic's beginning. Thus, a supply chain did not have enough time to recover and meet that speed. Even with international air freight, there is still a halt in automaker's production lines in the automotive sector. Illustrating that context, we studied a case in a company that operates in Brazil, which produces automotive components for a manufacturer of heavy cargo and passenger vehicles. The company was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic due to its low level, heightened by its suppliers' delays. The results indicated the need for the company to be prepared for the increase in costs and the search for strategies that minimize the negative impacts still caused by the pandemic context. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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This study analyzes the relationship of firm-level ESG scores and stock returns from a worldwide database for the automotive industry. It measures the significance of the ESG and CFP relationship during the last decade, and includes a comparison of those firms with different levels of ESG scores, as well as between firms with ESG scores and to firms that lack such scores. A quasi-experimental difference-in-differences (DID) design and a panel data are estimated to examine the impact of ESG scores and ESG combined scores on firms' stock return before and during the COVID-19 pandemic period. The results suggest that sustainable actions during the pandemic lessened stock returns, as evidenced by the negative coefficients of the ESGC and ESG scores. The interaction terms with firm size, revealed that ESGC and ESG scores had a positive relationship with stock returns during the pandemic. Thus, larger firms' returns benefited from higher ESG scores during the COVID-19 crisis. The performance of the stratified sample firms' stock returns in the context of the COVID-19 sanitary emergency is an original contribution to the literature on the ESG-CFP relationship. © The Author(s) 2022.
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In 2020 the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a worldwide public health emergency. Companies were swept by a tsunami, whose impacts are still conspicuous on everyone, everywhere, all over the planet, being the supply chains (SCs) the most affected items within the industrial sectors. Firms had no time to properly face shortages of raw materials and parts or avoid logistics disruptions. The purpose of this manuscript is to describe the change in the supply chain configuration, structure, and processes that permanently impact the automotive industry firms, addressed to face Covid-19. In fact, many companies implemented significant investments in a very short time horizon that highlighted new forms of doing business, to fulfil customer needs or new inspirations to define the ‘new normal’ after the pandemic. The main contributions refer to the Alpha company case that is largely impacted by the SC disruption due the pandemic. Alpha owns a complex supply chain, which consists of an inbound logistic, manufacturing part processes, and a sophisticated outbound delivery, both in the car manufacturers and in the spare parts industry. About the methodology, Alpha developed new models using a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) to reengineer the logistics of the European network, to lower costs, manage resources more efficiently and maintain resilience over the time. The main research findings are related to the actions to face the emergency and reduce its adverse impacts are basically due to a sudden reduction in demand, the production stop, the surplus of inventories and the internal inefficiencies coming from information mismatches. Therefore, Alpha has deeply revisited the internal processes, involving all the company departments, including manufacturing, purchasing and supply chain. To maintain a relevant strategic position into its competitive market, Alpha has implemented two main industrial projects: the new inventory management policy and the centralization of procurement processes. © 2022, AIDI - Italian Association of Industrial Operations Professors. All rights reserved.
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This paper investigates Honda Motor Co of Japan and over 50+ supply chain network relationships between suppliers and customers. These companies represent the industry through trading, specialty retail, road & rail, professional services, machinery, food products, electronic equipment, diversified financial, automobiles, and auto components. Using data from Bloomberg terminals, Mergent Online, Hoover Academics, and IBIS World, our goal was to understand Honda's supply chain risks and the capabilities needed to overcome them, in conjunction with their suppliers, customers' locations, and industry differentiators. We aimed to understand how they performed through the many disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic. Results showed that the main risks to Honda Motor Co are in three categories: Organizational (credit, agency), Industry (product market, input market), and Environmental (macroeconomic). The core capabilities that Honda Motor Co used to overcome these risks are Flexibility (financial strength), Velocity (efficiency, anticipation, security), and Collaboration (market position). As a market leader, Honda has demonstrated resilience and readiness to recover from these disruptions.
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Industrial Internet of Things and Industry 4.0 have been increasingly prevalent in the manufacturing sector since the mid-2010s, and the COVID19 pandemic has only strengthened this trend. However, there is a wide variation between companies in the degree of industrial digitalization adopted and the deployment context. This is particularly relevant in the case of the industrial maintenance sector, one of the business segments with the highest potential for digitization. This paper analyses the work environment by looking at the differences in the digitalization experiences of large domestically owned and international companies according to maintenance professionals in Hungary. The benefits and challenges of implementing Industry 4.0 will be examined, highlighting the differences between various types of companies. © 2022 IEEE.
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Suppliers play a fundamental role in the success of any supply chain. The damaging and disruptive effects of pandemics (i.e., COVID-19) on businesses and their supply chains have made the role of suppliers even more critical and pronounced. In this chapter, based on a critical review of literature about suppliers’ section, we develop a conceptual model that links both traditional and emerging criteria for suppliers’ selection. The developed model is applied to the case of the automotive industry. Our analysis shows that in a Post-COVID-19 era, suppliers need to invest and develop competencies, capabilities, and resources about human capital, communication skills, information technologies, and strategic commitment. We also provide insights and implications for managing the supply chain risks in a Post-COVID era. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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Due to impact for Coronavirus, Automotive industry faced challenges from global supply chain. Localization and De-globalization topic become more and more important. Automotive component purchasing strategy will be focused on localization. Target to keep whole supply chain safety and reduce additional risk and cost. © 2022 IEEE.
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The article addresses the commodity imports coming to Germany from the main centers of international trade (EU, USA, China). The dynamics of imports and structural shifts in trade flows in 2013‒2019 are compared with 2020‒2021. The comparison is carried out in three dimensions – country, industry and cross (country/industry) sectional views. In the country breakdown of imports, two levels are distinguished – aggregated one (the EU is considered as a whole) and disaggre-gated one (the EU is broken down by 27 countries before Brexit and by 26 countries after Brexit). The main sources of imports (the EU as a whole at an aggregate level and China, the Netherlands, the USA, Poland, France, Italy at a disaggregated level) and importers (automotive industry, electronics industry, production of other goods, chemical industry, mechanical engineering, electrical industry) are identi-fied. The author explored the role of the import core (complex of the main supplying countries in conjunction with the main importing industries) in the changes in German imports that occurred in 2021 and in previous periods (2013‒2019 and 2020). A certain shift is highlighted from concentration to fragmentation of changes relative to this core and then to the resumption of concentration, accompanied, by a steady growth, then by a decline and again a less confident growth. Shifts in the structure of German electronics imports are considered in connection with supply problems. On the basis of the analysis, assumptions are made about the further development of Germany's commodities imports. © 2022, Institute of Europe Russian Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.
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As the epidemic situation became more widespread in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the economic impact on a wide variety of industries began to grow steadily. One sector particularly affected by this issue is the automotive indus-try, which relies on a smooth supply chain largely because of the large number of electrical and mechanical components. One of these components are so-called semiconductors. The following article presents an analysis of the semiconductor shortage in the automotive industry in the context of risk and crisis management and derives recommendations for action. In addition to outlining the causes, the article focuses primarily on the question of how solution strategies for preventing a global semiconductor shortage could look in the future. The central question for this consideration is: could the current situation have been prevented by more effective risk and crisis management?. © 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston, Germany.