From the law of the jungle to partnership? The bumpy road to new producer-supplier relations in the automotive industry. The example of a bodywork and assembly plant

Since around a decade, the automobile industry is undergoing a dramatic turnaround. New strategies for marketing and producing are considered as trigger pulses for the emergence of different inter-firm relations between customers and suppliers in the car industry's production complex. The development of partnership between OEMs and suppliers asks from both sides new approaches, new routines in dealing with each other as well as new modes of thinking and acting. The following study reflects our understandings and experiences, we got by the project "Optimization of the sourcing and production strategies between suppliers and producer". A result is, that you can observe concepts and approaches of re-shaping of communication and co-operation, that reflect the completely different demands in the sourcing and production process. But their potentials can be tested and developed only very steadily. In reality, instruments and procedures of coordination and regulation as well as behaviours are dominating, which ground on obsolete power constellations and are minted by OEMs hegemony. Above all, the intented project's goal "development and testing of partnership in communication and co-operation in the relationships between the car factory and its suppliers" is determinated by centralized decision making-structures and by strategies of the car-company, which are partly contradictionary.