An analysis of supplier delivery performance: The FCA case

The automotive industry stands in the today's market as an industry characterized by high complexity in terms of product and network and from the presence of a close and collaborative relationship between the different actors of the supply chain. The customer’s demand for an ever greater speed and flexibility and for a continuous improvement in the technological and innovative component of the product drives the industry to face an increasingly competition. To maintain his competitiveness a company must find a way to adapt its-self creating relationships of great collaboration with the suppliers, adopting new technologies to allow an increasingly rapid and reliable exchange of information, introducing politics of management, like the risks’ analysis, turned to face the various situations of "emergency" that are caused by the intrinsic uncertainty of this type of industry. In this scenery the study and the monitoring of the delivery suppliers performance, considered in terms of on-time delivery, acquires great importance, as it makes able to have a great control on the processes and on the timing. Numerous studies have been realized to identify the factors tied up to the insolvency of the suppliers and, more in general, of the supply chain, but the context of this analysis will be reduced to the only transport’s process to reduce the influence of the upstream and downstream processes, usually characterized by major uncertainty. This thesis is directed to identify and to analyse in depth the factors, starting from the literature and from the analysis of the processes realized during the internship in FCA, which can influence the timing linked to the process of transport and a better understanding of which, from the point of view of the customer, could bring to notable improvements within the suppliers’ relationships. The tool used will be an analysis on the data transport, gathered from FCA, with the help of the methodology of the ANOVA analysis. The aim of this work will be to verify the existing bonds among the levels of the factors considered and the result that we want to study, in this case the quantity and the length of the suppliers delays, obtained comparing the date of expected arrival and the real recording of the merchandise at the plant. The final purpose will be the identification of the factors influencing the delays to understand where to work to get improvements both at process and monitoring level.