Design: a new challenge for suppliers

SAE 100 Future look: In today's fiercely competitive automotive industry, OEMs are asking suppliers to play an increasingly important role in the creation of value.

For a Tier One supplier like Faurecia, this means both added responsibility and added risk; we now have a greater share in the ownership of success or failure. We are not just making plastic parts and metal parts anymore, and we have to display skills in fields not traditionally associated with the automotive supplier.

Design is one such field. At Faurecia we created a cross-disciplinary Industrial Design Department in 2003, and today we have 40 people working in design studios in France, Germany, and the U.S. Our job is to use Faurecia's innovations to turn the vision of the OEMs' designers into reality.