Study Of The Pull Production Renovation Of The Supply Chain In GB Automobile Co.Ltd.

GB has experienced a long developmental period of15years. In the initialdevelopmental period, there were few vehicle models in China and most of themwere highly priced with low attraction and competitiveness, marking the beginningof the rapid development of China’s vehicle market. At such background, GBpioneered at introducing global YG models to China. These models were pricedquite low but their competitiveness were guaranteed, which turned out to beextraordinarily successful at the very start. Encouraged by this success, GBcontinued to introduce several other leading products, such as AO car and MPVcommercial car, which all enjoyed the same success as that of YG because of theirexcellent product power and attractive price.However, since2006, great changes have occurred to China’s vehicle marketenvironment. The volume of the market has been expanding at an accelerating wayand consumers’ requirements turned to be higher and more various. Under suchcircumstance, many foreign vehicle companies from such countries as Germany,USA, South Korea, and France launched their ultimate effort to introduce thestate-of-the-art products and technologies with the large production capacity toChina’s market. What’s more, their product power has been increasing as well,which can be seen from such aspects as engine technology, gearbox technology,security technology, and various new electronic technology applications. Acombination of these factors has triggered the accelerating trend of the developmentof more and more modern products, posing a severe threat to GB’s products. What’s worse, GB’s delayed and slow promotion of marketing capability and the influenceof the political factor even exacerbated its marketing environment. To better copewith such stern challenges, innovations have to be made in the marketing and salessegment, new products have to be introduced at an accelerating speed, and cost inmanufacturing and purchasing has to be reduced. Only in this way can GB regainand reshape its product competitiveness.The increasingly severe competition and the ceaseless introduction of newmodels from other companies have deprived GB of the worriless situation. Inaddition, GB has to constantly improve its producing-distributing system accordingto the irregular changes of the market dominated by the buyer and the largefluctuation of marketing requirements. Its initial production-by-plan system haschanged into first adjusting the production according to the prediction, then reducingthe minimum batch production, and finally frequently integrating the production anddistribution at present. However, what is obvious is that the all-round renovation ofthe supply chain looms ahead considering such facts as that orders from consumersalways cannot be satisfied, that a number of finished cars are left and stored, that theproducing-distributing system adjustment is becoming frequent day by day, and thatsupply and logistic capacity is facing a more serious threat.The past solutions, that is, the gradual increase of the supply chain managementaccuracy in a single segment and the single expansion of management scope, turnedto be ineffective and in vain in front of the present problems of supply chain. Inorder to increase the efficiency of the whole supply chain, a new and higherperspective shall be employed to make a whole-process analysis of the inventoryflow chain. OTD (Order-To-Delivery) will be a good perspective. According to theperspective, the original system, namely, orders from distributors, shall be replacedby the new one, namely, orders directly from customers, in which customers’ ordersact as the start of the supply chain. The core is to change the process into one of “customer---distributor---factory---distributor---customer” so as to resolve GB’sthorny problem in production-distribution segment.In a broad sense, theestablishment and practice of a complete set of pulling analysis and renovationsystem will contribute to the practical researches on the lean production inautomobile industry and provide suggestions for other industries to conductresearches on supply chain improvement, given the fact that automotive supply chainsystem is widely acknowledged to be the most complicated one in manufacturing interms of the length, depth, and scope of its food chain.