BRIEFING: Tier 0.5 manufacturers, where are you?

Five years ago the authors of this report published (under what was then the Financial Times Automotive banner) a management report called "The Emergence of the Tier 0.5 Suppliers - Implications for the automotive supply chain." That was in 1999 at the end of what was by any reckoning, a tumultuous decade for the auto industry culminating in the spin-off of Delphi from General Motors and Visteon from Ford, two moves which it was easy to predict, would change the dynamics of the supply chain. The Tier 0.5 FT report had itself started life as an update to a 1996 report, The Automotive Supply Chain - New strategies for a new world order. It soon became obvious, just three years later, that events had moved so quickly that a whole new approach was needed. What was really being discussed was not the traditional supply chain but strategies that had moved some suppliers into a different realm - that of the supply chain integrator of the "Tier 0.5 supplier", an original phrase attributed to Magna International.