Digital Transformation in the Automotive Supply Chain

In this paper, we begin the process of developing practice-based research problems and questions concerning supply chain digitalization in the automotive industry. Specifically, our focus is on understanding organizational conditions facilitating supply chain and production digitalisation and its role in performance improvement. Therefore, as a first step we organized a research workshop during last year’s Cambridge Center for International Manufacturing (CIM) Symposium with 30 executives representing multiple tiers of the automotive supply chain. The purpose was identifying key themes and patterns amongst these themes, which provides a basis for a practitioner-based, impact led research agenda. We presented the executives with ten digital scenarios developed by CIM, and recorded responses their responses to each scenario in a template of the ten scenarios. Using social network analysis (SNA) we then interrogated the qualitative data to identify: “inter-codal” patterns, linkages and relationships.