Supplies! Chrysler Claims To Have Turned Over A New Leaf

Cammy Corrigan
by Cammy Corrigan

A strong team is only as good as its weakest link, particularly in the automotive industry. Treat your suppliers well and they’ll play fair by you. Try to screw them and they’ll collapse leaving you with serious production problems. Detroit ( Chrysler in particular) had the worst reputation for treating their suppliers badly, but the Pentastar brand now claims to be trying to change all that.


Crainsdetroit.com reports that Chrysler LLC is reaching out to suppliers, by speeding up payments for some engineering, design and development work. This is an effort to repair the bad relationships Chrysler have with their suppliers. However, a quick look at the small print shows a different picture. This new vision will apply mainly to the new compact and mid-sized cars based on a Fiat platform. It seems that Chrysler so want (or need) the Fiat based cars to work that they want nothing to screw it up and that includes annoying their suppliers. “It’s no fun to work in a business where you’re fighting your supply base,” Dan Knott, Chrysler head of purchasing, “We need a healthy supply base.”. Really? Wow! If only companies like Toyota knew that, maybe they could become the biggest car company in the world(!)

Some of the new directives under this agreement include: Paying some suppliers upfront for costly advance engineering, design and development work on certain new Chrysler programs. Resolving outstanding payment claims faster. Paying suppliers in chunks at predetermined milestones in the life of the program. Mind you, the report does reveal a tasty fact.

Daimler AG scrapped a popular Chrysler program known as SCORE, instituted by onetime purchasing boss Tom Stallkamp, that shared cost savings with suppliers.

The new policies will be in effect by the end of January.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports that because Honda have an established presence in emerging markets as a motorcycle producer, Honda want to use that network to find suppliers for their global small car platforms for emerging markets. The rationale behind this is to keep costs down. Honda CEO, Takanobu Ito, said that these supply chain efforts were part of its efforts to counter a competitive marketplace which he described as “fierce”. Mr Ito also said that they were looking for supplier partners in Brazil and China.

Cammy Corrigan
Cammy Corrigan

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  • Geo. Levecque Geo. Levecque on Jan 19, 2010

    Heard somewhere today that 201o Chrysler vehicles are under a large Recall, for one thing I didn't think they had any new vehicles, what's up?

  • Windswords Windswords on Jan 19, 2010

    "Daimler AG scrapped a popular Chrysler program known as SCORE, instituted by onetime purchasing boss Tom Stallkamp, that shared cost savings with suppliers." And that in a nutshell is it. During the 1990's Chrysler was rated BY THE SUPPLIERS, as the best company to work with. This was reported in Automotive News (which I used to read with some regularity back then). I don't know if that's just the D3 or all the companies that manufacture in North America. They should just hire Tom Stallkamp as a consultant and reinstitute his system. Geo. Levecque, The only recall I know of is for a potential missing brake line clip that affects only 24,000 units. Kind of like the recalls Toyota used to have. :) The brakes are installed in the car as a pre-assembled unit, so the problem was caused by - you guessed it - a supplier.

  • ToolGuy I could go for a Mustang with a Subaru powertrain. (Maybe some additional ground clearance.)
  • ToolGuy Does Tim Healey care about TTAC? 😉
  • ToolGuy I am slashing my food budget by 1%.
  • ToolGuy TG grows skeptical about his government protecting him from bad decisions.
  • Calrson Fan Jeff - Agree with what you said. I think currently an EV pick-up could work in a commercial/fleet application. As someone on this site stated, w/current tech. battery vehicles just do not scale well. EBFlex - No one wanted to hate the Cyber Truck more than me but I can't ignore all the new technology and innovative thinking that went into it. There is a lot I like about it. GM, Ford & Ram should incorporate some it's design cues into their ICE trucks.
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