Global Supply Chain Theory And Its Applications In The Automotive Industry

Economic globalization has become a trend of the world economy. The essential character of economic globalization to the broad sense is the free and large-scale flow of the production factors in the worldwide, and that is the flow and allocation of the resource in a broader world market. The concept of the supply chain was put forward sin the late 1980's. As the appearance of the fierce competition of the global market and global making, more and more enterprises realize that they must carry out supply chain management to take full use of various kinds of resource to reinforce their competitiveness, and to respond to the change of market quickly to meet the consumer demand. The happen of global supply chain is on the basis of the economic globalization and the product complication caused by the technological advance, the improvement of transportation and information technology and the decrease of the cost, especially the international labor division changed from inter-product to intra-product. Just as the British expert of supply chain Martin Christopher says,"There is only supply chain, but no enterprises on the market","The competition in 21st century is not the competition between enterprises, but the competition between supply chains".The strategy of global supply chain is a compositive management thought and method, which emphases the efficiency and benefit of the whole supply chain, and pays attention to the cooperation between enterprises, and its aim is to increase the consumers satisfaction and decrease the whole cost, and seek the balance of the two aims.The formation and development of global supply chain makes our country participate in international labor division to drive the industry development and to promote the improvement of technology level, and thus has an effective of promoting economic development. But because we are the participant but not the manager of the supply chain, it is the developed countries master the most important parts of the value-add, such as core technology and band-saling advantage. The corporations in China are in the subordinate position, which is mainly engaged in the low value-add processing part, and is not good for technology development and innovation, and cannot gain the core competitive advantage of industry. The auto industryis the dominant industry, but still in the period of supply chain conformity, and the supply chain of the auto-industry in China still has a gap in comparison with the supply chain in the developed countries. The research of this thesis takes auto industry as an example, and uses the global supply chain strategy of the Ford Company for reference. This thesis analyses the practical condition of the auto industry in China, and how to reply to the effect of the global supply chain, and discusses about the measures that we should carry out to enter into the high level of the global supply chain to increase the competitive advantage of the enterprises, and to promote the development of economy in our country.