China Automobile Manufacturing Supply Chain Flexible Empirical Research

In the integration of global economy environment, no powerful corporation can accomplish all of its business by its own. They must manage their supply chain with their upstream and downstream partners. But with the fast development of science technology and economy, supply chain management faces a lot of uncertainty. And all of these uncertainty factors are increasing. And they may make supply chain broken and make it cannot meet customers' demand. It will bring bullwhip effect, wastes resources and so on. Researchers introduced a new concept, supply chain flexibility, to lighten and resolve all the above challenges. Generally speaking, flexibility is just a reaction to the environment uncertainty. And supply chain flexibility is about the elasticity of supply chain. For an automobile manufacturing company, it is the core member of its supply chain and uses huge resources. And China has become the third largest automobile manufacturing country and the second largest consumption market of new car in 2006. So, it is very important to do research about the problem of supply chain flexibility of automobile industry.This paper focuses on the theoretic model analysis, and wants to build up a theoretic model about automobile manufacturing supply chain flexibility, which is based on the former research achievements about manufacturing flexibility and supply chain flexibility, and the charictrestics of automobile manufacturing industry. This paper establishes the model from the perspective of automobile assembly manufacturer, just because it is the core member of its supply chain. Then, we get research data through questioniar. At last, we use Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) method to analyze the model from each dimesion of supply chain flexibility whether it fits the data or not and do some modification in the analysis process. Thronghing these steps, we establish and optimize the model. But, because of some limitations, we do not analyze from the perspective of whole model, and this should go deeper in further research.