Gestão da rede de suprimentos e estratégias de segmentação de fornecedores na cadeia produtiva da Fiat Automóveis S.A.

Abstract

Particularly within the automotive industry, the strategic management of outsourcing processes has been developed along with other philosophies and principles such as business process reengineering, lean production and supply chain management. Such innovations constrained the development of important competitive dimensions in the sector, such as time to market, cost reduction in production activities and in innovative processes, quality control, flexibility, timely response to demands. Similar to what would occur to other processes, procurement functions underwent deep changes, whereupon relevant trends for the dynamics of this industry were established. One such trend is the significant increase of strategic partnerships practices with a restricted number of critical first-tier suppliers, who, in general, provide strategic inputs for the contracting companys core competencies. A supplementary trend is an increase in quasi-market forms as a segmentation structure, when it comes to managing a more stable basis of non-strategic suppliers, who generally offer inputs of lower aggregated value. This thesis uncovered practices in supplier relations addressing some contractual, organizational and logistical dimensions of relationship between firms in the supply chain of Fiat Auto in Brazil, focusing the most recent and innovative forms of productive arrangements, such as those performed by coordinative agents known as sistemistas, as well as the importance of partnership and of quasi-market relationships in the companys procurement strategies in the 90´s. A case study method was used to identify and discuss the relationships between the leading agent in the value chain (Fiat Auto), a coordinative agent of first tier (Magneti Marelli), and five second tier sub-contractors. The data refers to a single automobile system, the exhaustion system, and enables a more comprehensive evaluation of the management principles and practices permeating the supply chain as awhole. From an operational viewpoint, different data collection techniques were used, such as questionnaires, interviews, direct observation of the automakers industrial plants and of its coordinative supplier, aggregated data, technical visits to research centers in Brazil and Italy, and analysis of corporate documents. The findings suggest that the introduction by Fiat, in the beginning of the 90´s, of managerial principles and strategies closely identified with lean production assumptions was a turning point in the history of the company. From the 90´s on, Fiat started showing interest in introducing a new engineering of relationship to its suppliers. Those firms, then, from mere suppliers of capacity, became steadily more valued for their ability to innovate and participate in a more tightly integrated production network. This was a giant step towards the fulfillment of needs deriving from Fiats boundary decisions and it is not by chance that today the procurement function is seen as an area of prime importance in the sustenance of its structural competitiveness in the long run. Regarding the case of Magneti Marelli, it shall be pointed out that between 1997 and 2000 the organization went all the way up from an simple auto parts manufacturer in Brazil (in fact, from nearly 40 different types of products, and as a whole very heterogeneous ones) to a coordinative agent position keeping its focus on five areas, and in many of which it has taken the leadership of the national market, providing complete systems and services solutions for its clients: sets of electronic injection and exhaustion systems, suspension system, body & interior (lights, cockpit, air conditioning and dashboards), electronic (computerized systems) and after market (spare parts and services). The responsibilities and challenges faced by Magneti Marelli have become more imposing, once the firm is now more focused on integrating the competencies of smaller companies to demands of higher aggregated value demanded by Fiat Auto. Therefore, it plays a crucial role in thecoordinative processes at that point in the network, once it contributes to a specific contracting environment, where transaction costs could be reduced and, at the same time, small and medium sized suppliers would have access to scale and learning economies. This research has also uncovered, albeit indirectly, that the sistemista firm plays a very important part in encouraging, also, further investment in asset specificity and the willingness of the economic agents to share risks in certain technological trajectories. Although the inquiry of interfaces between segmentation and innovative processes was not the central purpose of this study, these issues appeared and were studied in the process of theinvestigation with the automaker. In the launching of the second generation of the Palio family, for example, the improved relational capacity of Fiat may have contributed to influence the allocation of critical intangible assets in the innovation process such as information and tacit knowledge. In this sense, the results seems to indicate that partnership and quasi-market relationships can make innovation within the networking architecture feasible. These structures may have favoured the companys associative capability, which in turn may have affected the innovative processes and R&D activities of both the firm and the network in many product lines. It is then possible to infer that the more sophisticated the governance structure and the less precarious the confidence tiers across parties, the greater the flow of tangible and intangible assets between firms. In this sense, strategic supplier segmentation may assume different effects on performance and on innovation processes themselves, as the allocation of asset-specificity investments amongst agents and the efforts in order to improve collaboration between firms in certain technological trajectories isfeasible.