Roads to Resilience

cars and sales volumes that are a multiple of Jaguar Land Rover’s, bringing their averages down to lower levels. As Jaguar Land Rover lacks the means to compete head-on with its German counterparts, with regard to researching and developing new ways to meet ever stringent fuel consumption and emission standards, the company needs to think and work differently to ensure it has sufficient lead time and makes the most of its limited resources. It achieves this in a number of parallel ways: • By using the company’s operations around the world as its eyes and ears on the ground and to develop direct working relationships with regulators, Jaguar Land Rover in the UK will know about proposed regulatory changes as soon as discussions emerge. • By having an innate understanding of the company’s means and capabilities, Jaguar Land Rover can rapidly interpret the implications of changes and respond by shaping the solution space. For example, Jaguar Land Rover supports lower fuel consumption and emission standards, as would be expected from an ethical company. • Therefore, when changes are considered by legislative authorities around the world, Jaguar Land Rover is in a position to explain its business model to them and agree criteria. By attending conferences and reading industry journals, Jaguar Land Rover tries to predict the technology roadmaps of competitors and others. This enables the company to gain an impression of the future technology landscape, of what is and is not possible, at little cost, and to invest its own limited research and development resources where the company can make the greatest difference. One of these areas is the technology for building all aluminium vehicles, an area in which Jaguar Land Rover is an industry Supplier risk management and resourcing When Jaguar Land Rover was taken over by Tata Motors in 2008, many of their suppliers believed that the company would continue to struggle, as it had under Ford, or even go under in the face of rising commodity prices and weak global demand for luxury vehicles, due to the economic downturn. Consequently, many decided to scale down their production of parts for Jaguar Land Rover. When Jaguar Land Rover had turned the business around in 2010, introduced hugely popular new models such as the Range Rover Evoque in 2011, and sales volumes started to rapidly pick up across the board, particularly in emerging markets such as Brazil and China, the company realised that their growth could be constrained by a lack of supplier capacity. To better understand their supplier network and proactively deal with issues that could affect production, therefore avoiding the throwing away of revenue and profit due to missed sales, Jaguar Land Rover embedded specialist risk managers alongside the people who manage supplier risks as part of their day job. Working side by side, these teams identified opportunities to: • rationalise the supplier base and therefore reduce the company’s dependency on small, low item suppliers, • segment suppliers based on their strategic importance and value leader. This expertise enables the company to reduce the weight of its future models and, therefore, emissions and fuel consumption.

of procurements, and manage relationships accordingly, and • monitor the capability and capacity of suppliers better so that issues and alternative solutions could be explored earlier.

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Appendix A Case study: Jaguar Land Rover