The Research Of AST Company Supplier Management

As a small new joint-venture company and a subsidiary of multinational group, how to establish and develop its supplier panel? How to manage the suppliers properly under the oligopolistic competition market structures globally and domestically? Is there a better methodology to standardize the supplier management in the field characterized by higher RAMS requirements? This thesis analyses the AST's practices of developing and managing the suppliers, to study the approach of small joint-venture company to select, assess and manage domestic suppliers under the specific industry circumstance, so as to acquire sufficient and qualified raw materials and components to meet the requirements for organization development.Firstly, the thesis briefly addresses the technical and strategic significance of supplier management and its main objectives, studies the basic situation of mass transit transportation and equipments manufacturing, including its history, present status and prospects. The thesis also analyses the application in supplier management of related theories one by one, which are Dr. Michael Porter's 5-Force Competition Model, Supplier China Management, Stock management, JIT and Project Risk Management.Applying project risk management theory, the thesis analyses the selecting risk, technical risk and mono-supplying risk and corresponding measures taken to eliminate or reduce the occurrence, and affirms the positive affects of assessment methods that ATS and its competitors currently applying during supplier selecting. By comparing with the common assessment activity in automobile industry, proposes the application of IRIS in the process of regulating the railway industry supplier selecting and management as well as its significances and possibility.Secondly, this thesis studies a few cases of AST improving its supplier management, including driving overseas suppliers conduct technology transfer to domestic suppliers for technical advance and risk reducing, getting ride of mono-supplying risk, competition and cooperation with the suppliers that is subsidiary of competitor, sharing the supply chain benefit with supplier etc, so as to demonstrate that corresponding methods shall be applied for different suppliers. Quality improvement is one of the main tasks in common supply management, in which AST spends lots of human resource and obtains the expected result, the trade-off of cost and profit is always a big concern, while it worth to invest more at the beginning of supplier panel development to establish a long term partner relationship especially for new organization. Besides, focusing on long term cooperation, the performance appraisal methods of purchasing function shall be changed, TCO (total cost oriented) purchasing shall be considered both for purchasing assessment and strategy guiding. This thesis also inquires into the VMI (vendor managed inventory) and JIT application and improvement in AST.Due to the conflict of longer project tending process and shorter lead time, the big challenge is that the longer process of supplier developing and its commodity verification is not able to meet the project schedule, the better solution is to establish and develop a long term partner relationship with those capable suppliers, so that they can launch the related business and technical activities as early as possible to mitigate the increasing tight scheduling pressure once a project awarded.