A Discrete-event Simulation Model for Supporting the First-tier Supplier Decision-Making in a UK’s Automotive Industry

The automotive supply chain industry is characterised for a well-known hierarchical structure, where manufactures exchange partially their forecasting with their first-tier suppliers as a requirements demand, which implies in the most of the cases that suppliers must be prepared for handling a variety of potential requirements. Moreover, considering technological tools for handling such variety are crucial for managing efficiently the decision-making in this domain. Therefore, this paper presents a simulation-based model to support the resource allocation decision-making process in a real automotive first-tier supplier UK company. Results shown that operations management is enhanced across the selected first-tier supplier by reducing the reworks, which leads to achieve its production targets.