As a global player in the automotive electronics industry, ACTIA has gained considerable experience in managing its supply chain. In a global situation that is severely disrupted, the relationships that the group has established with its suppliers help strengthen its ability to serve its customers — through what ACTIA describes as an « extended enterprise » approach.

An industry under pressure

The electronics industry is facing many disruptions: geopolitical tensions, climate issues, the pandemic, and risks inherent to globalisation. While sourcing from suppliers based all over the world helps reduce purchasing costs and therefore production costs, it also increases risks: production delays, quality issues, transport problems, and more significant events such as natural disasters or political upheavals. These phenomena are expected to multiply in the years ahead, which is why ACTIA is actively developing resilience across its supply chain.

Resilience as a guiding principle

A resilient supply chain is one that can effectively weather multiple disruptions, allowing ACTIA’s production sites to keep running despite any incidents. To achieve this, certain prerequisites must be built in from the outset, so as to avoid repeating past mistakes. It has become vital to understand every link in the logistics chain for strategic purchasing families — semiconductors above all — in order to control risks. This requires an appropriate purchasing and procurement strategy in which data sharing between all stakeholders in the chain is absolutely essential.

A strategy built on partnership

ACTIA’s purchasing strategy is grounded in active market intelligence and the creation of a supplier panel with which the group develops close, long-term partnerships. Risk management and supplier relationship management therefore sit at the heart of the process for securing ACTIA’s supply chain.

The components crisis has accelerated a trend already underway: involving suppliers very early in projects, from the innovation and consultation phase of any tender. This allows suppliers to understand ACTIA’s emerging needs, while in return they share their innovation roadmap for their components — enabling innovations to be incorporated into designs at the earliest possible stage. In this respect, the supplier ecosystem becomes a true extended enterprise: suppliers are strategic partners for ACTIA’s innovation, product quality, and competitiveness.

A structured approach to market intelligence

To support this strategy, ACTIA relies on its Components Observatory — a dedicated team of at least twenty people tasked with continuously monitoring the electronics market. The Observatory provides precise information about the electronic components market to guide sourcing decisions and manage product obsolescence. ACTIA is one of the few EMS companies to have built this expertise and to offer this service to its customers.

The Observatory draws on reference databases — such as IHS — which feed into the group’s internal digital solution, iPersyst, specifically developed for managing component obsolescence. The platform now enables ACTIA to manage more than 150,000 components and more than 12,000 parts lists. During the development phase, engineers have an accurate picture of the status of every part in their bill of materials. In serial production, experts continuously monitor the status of each component to detect and manage emerging risks such as obsolescence. Digitalisation is a prerequisite for supply chain resilience.

Identifying and reducing risks from the design stage

The key phase for building a resilient supply chain is during product development: this is when risk mitigation actions are most effective. ACTIA has a dedicated purchasing team embedded within the product development team for precisely this purpose. This team carries out an exhaustive risk analysis across all references in the bill of materials throughout the development period, based on data collected by the Components Observatory. Supplier partners actively contribute the information needed for this analysis, which is why transparency is a defining criterion in the selection of partners.

The crisis has led ACTIA to deepen this analysis, particularly for semiconductor suppliers. The group now assesses their production capacities relative to overall demand, their front-end and back-end manufacturing sites, their dependence on subcontracting, and their multi-FAB strategy. A new criterion has also been added to the database: « procurability », which rates each component according to how reliably it can be sourced.

Multisourcing as the default rule

Working with multiple supply sources is essential for mitigating risks and securing the supply chain. Multisourcing is therefore the standard at ACTIA. Single sourcing — which applies only to very specific components such as CPUs, PCBs, and power ICs — is treated as a calculated risk. Initiated whenever a new reference is created, multisourcing helps manage component end-of-life, reduce redesign risks, and address supplier quality issues. It is also a key driver of competitiveness, and the crisis has not changed that.

A new era in supplier relationships

The supply crisis has shaken up the purchasing function’s iron triangle doctrine — Quality, Cost, Delivery — which rested on a fragile balance. In this new equation, Delivery has become the dominant factor, often at the expense of cost. Relationships with customers, partners, and suppliers have also evolved: the balance of power is being redrawn, and the supplier is becoming a partner on whom the ability to produce and deliver to customers directly depends. The supplier relationship is entering a new era — an essential link in the company’s competitiveness and long-term success.