Press Releases

The moment a truck leaves your gates, at its destination they already know what’s loaded onto it and when the goods will arrive. A luxury? For automotive, it’s simply standard, because the supplier sends the customer an Advanced Shipping Notice (ASN) at the moment of shipment. Alongside the call-off, it’s one of the two key messages in the whole supply chain. It offers information on the delivery in progress – what goods it contains, in what amounts and packaging, and when they’ll arrive. All this leads to an optimised supplier-customer chain, more precise production planning and optimised stocks.

Is digitalisation truly a benefit, or just a necessary evil? The 2018 Trends in Automotive Logistics (TAL) conference delivered a clear answer: Digitalisation pays off. But it must be preceded by thorough preparation. It also showed that technologies are constantly becoming simpler and more available, and the market eliminates the firms that don’t innovate. On October 10th in Pilsen, domestic and international speakers described how to prepare for the rise of new generations – and for the first steps in digitalisation. For what is now the nineteenth time, Aimtec joined up with IHK Regensburg – the chamber of commerce and industry for the Upper Palatinate and Kelheim regions in Bavaria, Germany – to organise TAL.

We’re calling off what we ordered, we’re ordering what we called off! Call-offs. A word (and above all process) that, while perhaps mysterious, must be learned in order to survive and succeed in automotive. But what really is the magic of this word? And what about the rest of the words in the full spell, like “delay”, “immediate need”, and “cumulative quantities”?

Electronic data interchange (EDI) has become a standard in a growing number of sectors. In automotive, EDI is uncompromisingly demanded not only by all of the world’s automakers, but also by a growing number of TIER1 suppliers. So if you want to acquire orders from automotive you can’t avoid EDI. 

The automotive sector places greater demands on suppliers than almost any other sector. Individual components need to meet strict criteria for the quality and traceability of materials, and additionally electronic data interchange (EDI) plays a key role. Although EDI doesn’t hold responsibility for manufacturing directly, integration with suppliers and customers is fundamental. If for example ASN (Advance Shipping Notice) messages remain undelivered for any reason, or they contain mistakes, fines (penalties) from automakers are a real, and threatening, possibility. These affect a supplier’s overall rating, and with it, its future contracts. Invoicing takes place over EDI as well, and so it’s important for everything to work as it should.

You come into the showroom, the salesman hands over the keys and you step up to your new car for the first time. The paint literally shines, and you look forward to the rev of the engine. But do you know how it got painted? And that it’s definitely not just one quick job after assembly? Paint shops are very complicated operations, and we’d like to describe them to you.