Introduction Supply chain management

        In every manufacturing and production business, the role of suppliers is always a crucial one. They are the important ones, who provide required materials and supplies to manufacture certain products, and if supplies are not available and disrupted due to any given reasons, the manufacturing and production process will be badly affected, and a firm may struggle to keep its supply and demand process on the right track. That’s why it is important that a firm has good relations with their suppliers, and both have good integrated operations to keep manufacturing process running smoothly without any disruptions (Teller et al., 2016). In a competitive business environment, where it is absolutely critical to remain on course with the supply of products in time to the customers so that they can be sustained by the organizations, otherwise they may look for other brands and firm, which are providing similar kind of products. It shows that how critical supply chain management process could be for the business organizations, and if process is not handled well, and then it can have dire consequences affecting the whole profitability of the business (Krause and Handfield, 1999)

        In automotive industry, the role of suppliers become even more crucial because they are responsible to provide very specific manufacturing parts, and if one part is missing from the supply chain, the whole process can be impacted, and eventually production may even stop. So, for every automobile industry, it is important to develop good relationship and communication with their suppliers so that required sources are provided in time, and product is developed to provide to target customers. The disruption in supply chain would ultimately affect the overall supply and demand process (Brandes, Brege and Brehmer, 2013). This is what was faced by the Nissan, one of the leading automotive companies in the world. In 1990s, they were facing various issues in their supply chain, and things were not going as well as they would have expected. So, there was a need to develop a programme, which could make things better for their supply chain management, so company started an initiative in this regard, and came up with a suppliers co-development programme, and name given to this program was Cogent. Nissan Company started this program with the coordination of their suppliers and Cranfield University (Wyatt et al., 1997)

References of Supply chain management 

Krause, D.R. and Handfield, R.B. (1999) Developing a World-class Supply Base, illustrated Edition edition, Center for Advanced Purchasing Studies.

Wyatt, C.M., Evans, S., Johnson, A.S. and Jukes, A.S. (1997) 'Co-development: The COGENT initiative', IMECHE SEMINAR PUBLICATION, 101-110.