Nissan links data, systems and regions in digital shift

Nissan is building a digital supply chain through a structured, regionally integrated foundation across its operations in the Americas. At the Automotive Logistics and Supply Chain Digital Strategies North America conference in Nashville, senior executives from Nissan Group of the Americas share how data centralisation, system harmonisation, cybersecurity resilience, and regulatory compliance all feed into the OEM’s digital transformation.

Data-driven supply chain decision making

One of Nissan’s defining pillars for its supply chain transformation is its data and analytics strategic pillar, which focuses on tier-N data availability and visibility. One of the managers of this pillar is Grecia Luna, manager of SCM innovation data and analytics at Nissan Group of Americas.

De la Torre says that Luna and the team have consolidated information in a single source – Nissan’s Tier-N Sourcing Digital Platform – that allows much more speed in evaluating the market and making decisions through data availability, while confirming scenarios and risk.

"It's becoming more normal for our teams to live in earlier, proactive alerts, rather than trying to fix it when we’re already almost up to our necks.

“Through the data information that’s available, we can make further optimisations for inventories, free cash flow and logistics costs,” De la Torre says. 

Currently, he says that 93% of more than 1,800 suppliers in Nissan’s North American operation have provided their tier-N data under non-disclosure agreements.

“Through the Tier-N data availability, and training, and data alerts, we have advanced to quite immediate identification of further threats,” he says, “and it’s becoming more normal for our teams to live in these earlier and proactive alerts, rather than trying to fix it when we’re already almost up to our necks.”

Nissan’s data network began in October last year, with a final configuration of the digital tool in November as data from teams across the network was uploaded. By March and April, the system was giving highly accurate alerts for things like weather alerts and natural disasters, financial distress of suppliers, and customs alerts.

Talent development and cross-functional culture

While it’s important to have reliable tools, Luna says it’s imperative to ensure that the OEM doesn’t only need to rely on the IT systems themselves but can also rely on its teams. “We wanted to upskill the talent, making sure that we had that bandwidth across the organisation,” she says. “Then we could centralise our data, which enables a lot of things to be realised and gain insights.”

Nissan is combining the use of this data and digitalisation with its people. Using digital tools, data visualisations can be created to improve understanding and visibility across teams. Luna says some teams are doing operational work that can open up pre-built visual dashboards and make quick decisions based on these or build new dashboards to gain their own insights. “We’ve also got data scientists working directly on my team,” she says. “Anything that needs more advanced applications such as predictive modelling or optimisations, can be done now because we’ve got that data nice and right.”

Once an alert is prompted by the system, teams within Nissan can determine if they need to take action on it. “Not every alert is a catastrophe, thank goodness, because we get a lot of alerts,” Luna says. “I think the next step for us is how we can integrate that into other systems so that it is more seamless across the board, rather than just an independent system as it is today. That’s where we’re really on the edge of being able to crack the code.”

The OEM has been working to integrate these systems, and over the last five years it has gone through a system transformation, launching a transport management system (TMS), warehouse management system (WMS) and yard management system (YMS). “At this point we’re just continuing to investigate the new technologies and trying to understand what else we can do,” she adds.

System integration and regionalisation

With these WMS, TMS and YMS platforms, Nissan ensured they were unified across the US, Mexico, and now South America and Brazil. “We now see the Americas as a full organisational entity, with all the systems [integrated] from one point of view for all our operations,” says De la Torre.

This regionalisation increases operational consistency while enabling local adaptability, especially for Latin America, by transitioning from siloed operations to a cross-functional digital ecosystem, supported by shared infrastructure and vendor alignment.

Part of what makes this regionalisation possible is the way Nissan has structured its internal divisions, helping promote crossover training across teams and countries. Luna explains that the supply chain innovation team sits right in the middle of the group, “so IT does know just enough about the business, and the business knows just enough about IT to have some of that technical conversation, but our job is to be able to get a little deeper in both of those realms to facilitate the conversations and break down some of the barriers and say whether something is feasible”. She adds: “I think that’s what’s made us very successful in the process of digitalisation.”

Supplier collaboration and industry standards

In centralising data, Luna says Nissan started with legacy data, which was most readily available and widely used. Then, she says the team moved on to vendors and partners.

“As we were launching new systems, one of the key things that we were looking for with vendors is whether we could have the data and how we could get it included in our data lake,” she says. “At this point, we are pretty mature in both of those spaces and we’re started to dabble even further out into the supply chain, starting to look for carrier data or supplier data and how we can integrate that into the data lake and make it useful information as well.”

Compliance as a core supply chain function

Of course, with so much data sharing, and the non-disclosure agreements that can often come with that, there is a pressing need to ensure compliance with regulations that vary across regions.

Adam Shumake, senior manager of SCM compliance, Nissan Group of Americas explains that the carmaker created a new compliance function in response to the rising regulatory complexity in topics such as sustainability, rare earth minerals, and data.

Through this team, the group has integrated compliance data collection into existing systems, replacing fragmented spreadsheets. Shumake says that his team conducted a sort of experiment to test the OEM’s data quality and compliance. “We wanted to look at information that had traditionally been collected within an Excel sheet,” Shumake says. “Some people had pasted PDF comments in there, some filled out half the cell, some merged cells. You know the data integrity problems that come along with an Excel sheet. To go through 30,000 Excel sheets and try to read each of those rows was simply not going to be practical.”

Instead, the team followed their FAIR acronym of making data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. “The team worked on the backend system to build a module that would help us collect data that was already required by contract, already within our part validation processes, already assumed to be considered through the lifecycle management. And we actually made it more usable. Then we could really accelerate through technology.”

The team then reinforced consistent governance through documented escalation and response protocols. By doing this, Nissan has positioned compliance as a competitive advantage, highlighting the cost of non-compliance as a key ROI driver.

Cybersecurity built into supply chain operations

A part of this compliance is to help improve cybersecurity, which is something that Eric Elliot, SCM senior manager, supplier cybersecurity manages at Nissan Group of Americas.

He says cybersecurity is more important than ever, with more connected technology and increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks that can exploit data at a greater scale. The addition of tools like AI, which can be beneficial, can also be used to spread disinformation and open up organisations to even more vulnerabilities, such as AI-powered phishing attacks, which often come hidden in PDFs.

To combat these cybersecurity issues, Elliot’s team helped build a cybersecurity programme in 2023 tailored to supply chain risk in the Americas and rolled out a three-tier approach through assessment, monitoring and response. This helped establish a playbook response for coordinated action across logistics, inventory and IT when a supplier breach occurs.

For assessment, the team sent questionnaires to their suppliers to understand their weaknesses and strengths in cybersecurity, and then began monitoring these. In the first year of the programme, the team sent around 29 assessments. In 2024, there were more than 40. This year, Elliot estimates around 100 assessments with suppliers. “We’ve got the tools in place that can actively monitor our suppliers and understand where the risks and problems are,” he says. “Then we can work on the response.”

Nissan bands assessments of suppliers’ cybersecurity and subsequent actions based on the level of risk they pose to the supply chain network. Once a report is created, Nissan steps in to help. “We’re not just looking at a thumbs up and going away,” Elliot explains. “We create a formalised report and work with them over time to remediate their issues. That’s one thing we found is very well accepted from our suppliers.”

Unlike many digital strategies that remain aspirational, Nissan’s approach is already delivering results across its vast production and logistics footprint in the US, Mexico and now Brazil. The company has tied together operational data and decision-making in ways that enable speed and agility, while also reducing risk and elevating supplier performance.