There's a mix of good news and bad news in the 12th-annual North American Automotive OEM-Tier 1 Supplier Working Relations Index, which tracks suppliers' perceptions of their working relationships with the major automotive OEMs.
On the positive side, General Motors Co. (IW 500/5), Ford Motor Co. (IW 500/6) and Chrysler Group LLC collectively achieved their highest scores since Planning Perspectives Inc. first launched the index, with GM and Chrysler making strong year-over-year improvements.
"They have just been doing the things that need to be done to improve their relations," John Henke, president of Birmingham, Mich.-based Planning Perspectives and a professor at Oakland (Mich.) University, said of GM and Chrysler.
Chrysler's supplier relations could hit a speed bump in the short term, Henke said, after highly respected former purchasing chief Dan Knott succumbed to cancer in April. However, Knott's successor, Scott Kunselman, should keep Chrysler heading in the right direction, Henke added.
"I don't know [Kunselman], but the people I've talked to at Chrysler say he's just like Dan," Henke said.
Ford continues to lead the Detroit Three on the supplier-relations index, although the automaker's score slipped from 271 to 267 year-over-year.
Toyota Motor Corp. (IW 1000/5) and Honda Motor Corp. (IW 1000/23) have ranked first and second every year since the launch of the supplier-relations index, and 2012 is no exception. Toyota ranks first with a score of 296, followed by Honda with 293.
However, both automakers posted double-digit declines in their scores, continuing a trend that dates back to 2007.
"To be perfectly frank, I was absolutely flabbergasted when I got the data," Henke said of Toyota and Honda. "Because I reasonably expected -- in fact last year I told people -- that worst-case they'll be flat, and best-case they'll move up again."
While Henke again said he expects the two automakers to improve in next year's index, he acknowledges that the combination of the recent recession and last year's natural disasters in Japan and Thailand has been a powerful one-two punch.
"The tsunami had a tremendous impact, because it caused both of these companies to spend an inordinate amount of time just trying to keep production going, and they couldn't worry about relations -- they just had to keep the production going," Henke said.
Meanwhile, Nissan Motor Co. (IW 1000/29) has made some modest gains under Rebecca Vest, Renault-Nissan's vice president for North American purchasing, Henke pointed out.
Nissan ranks fourth in this year's supplier-relations index, with a score of 256, up from 247 last year.
