Just a few chips missing? How automotive players should strategically safeguard their semicon-ductor supply chain

Authors

T. Schadt, M. Gloger, C. Foltz - PwC Strategy& (Germany) GmbH

Summary

The global semiconductor shortage hit the automotive industry hard in 2021 and 2022. The processes and tools typically used by OEMs to cope with such situations have proven to be unsuitable. As the semiconductor supply chain is expected to remain a bottleneck for the foreseeable future, OEMs need to rethink their approach to semi-conductor management. In this paper, we propose a novel risk-based approach that helps to identify potentially critical electronic components early in the development process, and supports developers and buyers with predefined mitigation measures to lower the risk of a shortage. Furthermore, it can support sourcing and architectural decisions to make the E/E architecture of new vehicles more resilient. The validation of our approach, in collaboration with automotive OEMs and Tier-1 suppliers, demonstrated high effectiveness, suggesting that ~75 percent of all critical semiconductor incidents could have been avoided with risk-based semiconductor management.