Vendor-customer relationship for product design - An exploratory study of Indian automotive industry

Abstract

Study focuses on the partnership between Indian automotive vendors and vehicle manufacturers for product design activity. A structured questionnaire was developed to collect unit level data. Questionnaire included closed ended questions and the responses were taken on a 5-point scale. Responses (84) were collected from vendor organizations (40). Vendors were clustered into different categories for bringing out their characteristics. The level of involvement of vendors in the product design activity for their customers was investigated. A very low involvement of vendors was observed for this activity and there is a lot of variation with respect to this activity for different Clusters.