Supply Chain

Operating in an increasingly competitive market, the supply chain is a key to Hispano-Suiza’s strategy. We recently created a new Supply Chain department, consolidating four key functions: purchasing, procurement, purchasing quality, and supplier development.

Hispano-Suiza has set up a global network of suppliers, helping reduce our exposure to fluctuating dollar exchange rates, and we seek to develop real long-term partnerships with these suppliers.

For instance, we invite our suppliers to help meet our “design to cost” objectives during the initial design process, in all applicable areas of purchasing. By taking this approach earlier in the process, we can choose materials and production processes that help us reduce development and production engineering times, while also controlling our costs.

As part of this extended collaboration, we also support our suppliers’ efforts to implement their own continuous quality and productivity improvement actions to ensure the satisfaction of our end-customers (this is part of our Supplier Development initiative).

For example, in April 2010 we won the Safran group Lean-Sigma Innovation Award for our project “A drastic improvement in the reliability of a strategic Group supplier.” This award recognized the collaborative improvement initiative launched by a Hispano-Suiza team along with a supplier of small precision mechanical parts, Vignal Artru Industries. It provided real methodological support for our supplier, enabling them to improve quality, lead-times and costs.