Manufacturing strategies in the auto industry in Brazil and Spain

The aim of this paper is to identify and to analyze the manufacturing strategies of two supply chains of the auto industry and the assemblers´ influences on the other participants in each chain. Two plants of the same assembler, one in Brazil and the other in Spain and their suppliers, were analyzed, using questionnaires and interviews. It was observed that the competitive priorities of the suppliers are strongly conditioned to the strategy of the assembler, and the ordination of these priorities in the Brazilian case is different from that in the Spanish case. In Brazil and Spain the inter-business relationships are suffering a transition from mass production, with conflicting relationships supplier-automaker, to a relationship of larger cognitive density, characteristic of the presuppositions of organization of supplies based on the model flexible production or lean manufacturing.