
The challenges for a Director Manufacturing and Supply Chain Planning working in Automotive - Passenger Vehicles include ...
Lowering the cost of quality
With ever increasing complexity and variability, manufacturers must find new ways to enable and overlay quality controls without increasing costs or process waste.
The high-value manufacturing industry is undergoing unprecedented change, driven by consumer choice and the growing demand for built-to-order products. Driven by transformative digital technologies, the factory of the future will need to be flexible, standardised and efficient to maintain or grow competitive advantage.
The need to minimise cost of quality is a fundamental challenge since quality issues arise across the manufacturing value-chain, including:
- Late, incorrect or out-of-sequence delivery of kits and subassemblies
- Wasted time due to manual product identification
- Paint mutilation from physical tethers
- Inability to incorporate mobile processes including online rework and digital inspection
- Inability of workers to rapidly switch between work packages driven by product complexity and variability
- Inability to implement reliable audit and compliance processes
- Bottlenecks and congestion causing quality and throughput issues
Sub-optimal productivity
High-value manufacturing with complex moving processes presents many productivity challenges for manufacturing OEMs. The movement of inventory, tools and assets is tightly tied to production planning and delivery schedules, so much so that deviations from plan can result in significant downtime, reduced productivity and order-to-delivery delays.
These challenges exist across the entire value-chain, from inbound logistics through to end-product distribution, including everything from:
- Production downtime caused by container docking errors, parts delivery delays and point-of-use errors
- Inability to adapt and re-plan against errors in real-world delivery status
- Inefficient and inflexible assembly workstations resulting in waiting time, process waste and stressed processes
- Lost, forgotten and ageing WIP
- Under-utilised value-adding processes and over-utilised buffers and storage
- Low productivity driving high WIP inventory build-up and high labour costs to hit delivery schedules
- Lack of information sharing required to adapt and respond to upstream departmental delays
- Realisation of Industry 4.0 strategy limited by an inability to optimise the system rather than the silos
Related Products

SmartSpace Inbound Logistics Monitor
SmartSpace monitors the location of WIP in the yard, where high volumes of finished and unfinished product are widely dispersed around site, awaiting the next phase in their production lifecycle. Operations teams can now instantly find individual or groups of products, increasing productivity by eliminating search waste.

SmartSpace Process Control
Ubisense virtualises physical process controls and removes the constraints of traditionally fixed workstations. This frees up planning teams from fixed TAKT times and can better align process design with product complexity. Operational teams can quickly reconfigure and rebalance the line to rapidly react to product and process changes.

SmartSpace Yard Monitor
SmartSpace Yard Monitor helps to solve a range of challenges caused by delays owing to yard audit and search.

SmartSpace platform
Industrial IoT at enterprise scale
SmartSpace is an enterprise platform that uses location and identification from any source to create visibility of real-world objects and their interactions, enabling complex manufacturing processes with high levels of variability to be more flexible, easier to manage and easier to control.





