SUPPLIER EYE

Meeting the less-is-more challenge of global scale

The industry's quest to increase scale is an ongoing battle-balancing the need to customize tomorrow's vehicles to suit consumer tastes and regional regulations, with the competitive reality of driving down costs through volume. Establishing a “Less is More” mantra within this scenario has challenged the past generation of OEM leadership.

Through the late 1980s and into the '90s, Japanese OEMs showed the rest of the industry that designing and engineering global platforms to the highest common-design denominator reduced capital requirements, speeded development and added inter-region flexibility to react to fluctuations in demand. Not until the beginning of the 2000s did the Detroit 3 begin to offer true global platforms-notably Ford's C1 and GM's Delta. Both C-segment platforms had volume considerations in at least three major markets-North America, Europe and China.