The Covid pandemic’s effects continue to reverberate throughout the automotive industry—namely, in supply-chain management.
Automakers have long had close working relationships with Tier 1 suppliers—the companies that directly supply them with components. But up until the start of the pandemic and the ensuing semiconductor shortage, their view into the network of smaller sub-tier suppliers was more opaque, Jeff Morrison, GM’s SVP of global purchasing and supply chain, told Tech Brew.
“What we really learned with Covid was, we have to take it to a whole next level,” he said.
Map it out: So in 2022, the automaker worked with its suppliers (of which it has roughly 18,000 around the world) to launch a suite of AI tools to improve visibility and resiliency and mitigate risks. They include:
- A supply-chain mapping tool based on data from global suppliers
- “SupplyHealth,” a tool that monitors thousands of sites to identify potential risks
- A communications platform that notifies employees when risks have been identified
- And a “risk intelligence” system that uses machine learning and AI to tag public posts that could represent risks in GM’s supply chain.
General Motors
“The first thing that we did was we mapped the supply chain down to a level that we haven’t done before,” Sean Gaskin, a systems engineer who helped develop the tools, said.
“We can actually use various machine learning techniques and various disclosures from our suppliers to do that. In the automotive supply chain, a lot of the networks themselves are confidential in nature. They’re protected by NDAs,” he added. “So it gets a little hard to surveil that on the public internet, but you can work with your suppliers as partners, and they will disclose their supply chain to you, and then you can actually start to help them mitigate risk themselves.”
The risk intelligence system, Gaskin said, allows risk analysts to avoid looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack.
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“The machine learning algorithms and the large language models are helping them identify those needles without looking at the large bale of hay,” he said. “Once we train those models on those risk signals, the machine goes to work and surveils the news for any risk that we might have.”
Working together: Getting suppliers on board was no small feat.
“It’s not easy just to say, ‘This is a requirement; please now disclose all the way down, as far as you can, all this data and information,’” Morrison said. “We find it’s more powerful and impactful when they actually need our help.”
Pandemic-related disruptions spurred GM to dig deeper into its supplier network. It helped that the automaker was able to come to the table with resources that OEMs have greater access to, Morrison said, like connections with government officials.
“As you can imagine, when you ask a Tier 1 supplier to provide their Tier-n information, that’s very, very sensitive information for them. It’s a competitive advantage,” Morrison said, referring to sub-tier suppliers. “So we’ve also worked hard to have trust in a relationship and actually be a good partner so they’ll work with us to disclose that.”
The new system has helped GM respond to the Trump administration’s automotive tariffs, including avoiding downtime at plants due to China’s move to restrict exports of rare earth elements and magnets.
“When you get into some of the details and intricacies of trade, we can look at that early on and say, ‘OK, we understand you’ve got tariff risk. We see it,’” Morrison said. “And then we’re in a better position. We can start the conversation earlier about, what can we do to mitigate it?”