[Allpar News System]

Chrysler Group CEO Sergio Marchionne addressed more than 1,000 automotive leaders at the 2013 SAE World Congress Annual Banquet on Thursday. The event took place at Detroit's COBO Center in Detroit. Marchionne spoke of the need to evolve the industry’s business models and map out directions to drive the innovations the industry must have to thrive and grow. "I believe the age we are currently living in represents the threshold of a major new frontier," Marchionne began. "First and foremost, it represents the transition phase between our vision of globalization and the practical achievement of that vision.” “In the automotive industry, globalization has enabled us to build highly sophisticated supply chains,” he added. “Suppliers play an increasingly important role as companies shorten product cycles, venture into new markets and attempt to reduce costs. But in an ever-changing world, the interconnected nature of supply chains puts them at risk for disruption..

View the original, full post

 

[MoparNorm]

Nice concept, in theory, but so far he hasn't been able to prove the theory in practice. Quality issues, production delays, missed deadlines, late launches, all tell me that the "old antiquated methods" weren't so bad when it came to results.
Rhetoric only takes us so far, and "talking new" is just that, talk.
Some processes are ages old for one simple reason, they worked, modernization is good, as long as it works and produces a profit.
New to be new is meaningless if the new way of conducting business is inferior to the old.
The jury remains out..
The success he has produced to date is the result of improved build quality and styling improvements to old products, not about any paradigm shift.

 

[ChryslerFiatfan]

Sergio is making tremendous progress with unifying the Fiat and Chrysler architectures. At the same time he has had the management team racing to perform and at a pace that is unsustainable long term. Once the D segment Chryslers and the Alfa Romeo products and vehicles are released for production, in the next 12 months, I think it will be time for a pause, lest there be management burnout.

Still the transformation of both Fiat and Chrysler and their car designs, their powertrains, their drivetrains, their platforms, and their factories to build them is just amazing. In addition to the new paltfoms and the architectures, they have a completely new engines including the TwinAire, the AR 1.8 all-alloy family, the re-engineered Thundershark big I-4s, the PentaStar V6s, and even the updated truck Hemi v8s.

It is simply amazing that these new engine families are being built in the most modern green field engine factories with state of the art CNC tooling. Not forgetting to mention the CRD Multijet II and VM Motori diesels or the new axle factories or the gutted transmission facilities building world class ZF transmission designs under license. When your cars are using the same transmissions as Rolls Royce, BMW 7 series, and Audi A8,or your DSG the desire for world and class leading designs is apparent.