Study On Inventory Management In Webasto Shanghai Ltd

With the rapid development of the automotive industry during these years, the automotive industry has formed the fast development with OEMs rapid development as a sunrise industry. Most of automotive enterprises establish the plant around OEMs, and meanwhile the OEMs occupy a strong position throughout the wholesupply chain absolutely. With the growth of car sales, OEMs realize the importance of the inventory cost and transportation cost more and more, then they change the logistics model step by step from the self-logistics mode to "OEMs center type" and 3PL party logistics. As a result, they transfer the huge inventory costs and transportation costs to the automotive company quickly. But to suppliers, they have to accept the unfair rule in order to obtain projects from OEMs. Unfortunately with the lower and lower profit and higher and higher inventory cost, these suppliers are suffered huge pressure to implement this rule.First, this article starts with the concept of inventory, inventory cost and control methods, inventory management and other related theories and the explaination. Second, we select some tipical inventory management theory for automotive enterprises, the explaination for these theory, advantages and disadvantages; Then the study is taken on W Company Shanghai plant as the research object, through studing the existing problem according to these inventory management theories, to find the improvement action for this company. Such as the optimization of the inventory structure and relieve the "bullwhip effect" during forecast treatment, Activity Based Classification and etc. All of these are working for the optimization of inventory cost. But all of these should be established under the condition of Supply Chain Integration, and the good cooperation beween customer and supplier. Finally, there is a short summary in the end of this article. And points out the shortcomings of this article innovation and research results.