JLR recognises top ten suppliers
Jaguar Land Rover has recognised its top ten direct production suppliers at the company’s inaugural Supplier Excellence Awards.
Companies from Corby to Cairo were presented with trophies by British actress, Joanna Lumley, at a ceremony held in the West Midlands, the heart of the company’s UK operations.
Explaining the rationale for the new award programme, Ian Harnett, Jaguar Land Rover director of human resources and Purchasing, said, ‘These awards recognise the role that our supply chain plays in meeting our business objectives and celebrate the achievements of companies that have excelled on quality, delivery, cost and absolute certainty of supply. We are also saying a special thank you to those supplier facilities that have shown ‘Above and Beyond’ flexibility, or have worked quickly to meet production or design challenges.’
A total of ten trophies were presented for performance in 2014: two gold, four silver and four bronze. The awards went to individual plants or facilities, rewarding on-time delivery, continuous quality, accreditation to international and Jaguar Land Rover standards and flexibility to meet the company’s developing needs.
Over the past five years, Jaguar Land Rover has doubled sales and employment, tripled turnover, and invested over £10bn in new product creation and capital expenditure. In 2014 it opened its first major overseas manufacturing site in China and laid the foundation stone for its new Brazilian plant, which will open next year. The company’s innovation is continuous, with 50 major new and model-year upgrade product launches planned for the next five years, offering increased opportunity for its supply base.
Ian continued, ‘Jaguar Land Rover is gearing up for the future and we need our suppliers to do the same, enabling us to deliver class-leading vehicles to our customer base across the globe.
‘The ten facilities recognised through our first annual Excellence Awards are the leading examples of how our strong supply base is stepping up to the mark.’
Jaguar Land Rover chose to award individual supplier locations, rather than overall groups, in recognition of the importance of a close working relationship with each facility, founded on principles of integrity, honesty and trust. As a reflection of its approach to supplier relations, Jaguar Land Rover was named most trustworthy OEM in a recent study conducted by global information and analytics provider, IHS Automotive.
