ABSTRACT
The scope of firms’ operations and market arrangements in many industries – and especially in the automobile industry – has been subject to rapid changes in the past few years. On the one hand, the main leading manufacturers, also known as Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), have been more and more focused on their core competencies, while delegating a large share of development and manufacturing to suppliers. On the other hand, final products are nowadays conceived more and more as modularized platforms, and the definition, scope and diffusion of outsourcing activities have been constantly evolving. Those trends have led to considerable reorganization of tasks, responsibilities and competencies as well as risks along new supply chain layouts. As a result, new patterns of supplier-manufacturer collaboration have emerged. While outsourcing arrangements typically result in pyramid-shaped layouts, where OEMs delegate a large share of their operations to tier-1 suppliers, in the case of the European automotive industry, delegation by OEMs has tended to been only partial, since they have been inclined to secure the contractual organization and interorganizational division of supply chain activities via direct contacts with tier-2 suppliers. As a consequence, pyramid-shaped layouts have often and increasingly given way to more complex triangular relationships, in which middle-players, such as tier-1 suppliers, are bypassed by direct contacts taking place between their supply chain partners. This particular pattern of contractual arrangements seems to be one of the major elements that is reshaping the automotive industry lately, both in terms of the amount of interactions that they generate and because of their potential to trigger off a huge amount of coordination as well as conflict problems over the creation and distribution of value. As a matter of fact, there is growing empirical evidence which seems to confirm that while triangular relationships emerged as a way to improve monitoring and limit the incentives for opportunistic behavior in supply chain activities (in particular of middle-players as tier-1 suppliers), nowadays they seems to have broken trust and disrupted cooperation between the parties involved in the supply chain.
