Mitigating data inaccuracy and supply chain challenges in Western Romania's automotive industry

The purpose of this paper was to emphasize the importance of data accuracy within internal logistics systems and their extended influence on supply chains in automotive industry through 6-month multiple case studies conducted on 3 first tier original equipment manufacturers (OEM) based in Western Romania. The study investigates the most common causes of data inaccuracies among automotive suppliers and their approaches to reduce consequential supply chain issues and be more agile. Data collection and analysis revealed that main issues arise due to ordering quantities mismatching actual customer demand, a wide range of order lot sizes, lead times and delivery reliability concerns and the reluctance to shift away from mainstream cost-effectiveness and towards strategic added value thinking. These issues sourced significant other related operational challenges such as excessive inventory, short-term stockouts and subsequent express shipping services or product-related inconveniences (quality and capacity levels, contracted volumes and dedicated lines). The paper sources different logistics and supply chain strategies used by the 3 OEMs, their features and operational performance, as well as their overall effectiveness, which can be applied by other automotive industry suppliers to improve own results. Introducing more reliable real-time data collection tools and performance metrics has started hauling more focus towards solving these prevalent issues with some ongoing improvement projects showing up to 25% better results. For one of the 3 OEMs introducing a new warehouse management system has already sourced an overall quality increase (5 percentage points) due to a 60% higher utilization of its production equipment.