How IT teams are supporting Nissan's Re:Nissan strategy across manufacturing and supply chain in the Americas
As it executes its Re:Nissan recovery plan to recover business performance and reposition Nissan for long-term success, the OEM's IT teams have been forced to reassess their priorities. At ALSC DS North America, Nissan's Steve Smith discussed balancing business agility with operational excellence, building the right data foundation for AI and Nissan's reconfiguration of its vehicle production footprint in Mexico.
Steve Smith, director of IT, manufacturing and supply chain management at Nissan Americas, took to the stage at ALSC Digital Strategies North America on June 10 to share with the audience how IT teams at Nissan are supporting the carmaker's recovery and digital supply chain transformation.
Designed in response to today's challenging business environment and the company's high-cost structure, the Re:Nissan plan for recovery was announced in 2025 with the aim of achieving positive operating profitability and free cash flow in its automotive business by FY 2026.
Sitting on the Red Sofa with Automotive Logistics, Smith outlined some of the most important tasks for Nissan's IT teams during this period of significant transition for the business' operations. He explained that the change forced the company to stop pursuing some activities it had previously explored and invested in, focusing more on what needed to be a priority to enable the transformation.
"We changed – it was all for the right reasons but it was tough," explained Smith. "This is where our priorities are and this is where we need to put our focus."
Balancing business agility with operational excellence
As Smith identified, manufacturing and supply chain priorities can change rapidly, requiring IT to remain flexible. However, he noted that despite shifting business objectives, security and operational excellence remain pillars at the very core of Nissan's IT goals.
"Those pillars never change, and those are things that we set as our IT goals that are paramount, regardless of the business priorities, and that we're not willing to sacrifice," he said.
Central to achieving this balance, Smith acknowledged, is creating a culture and a mindset based around these pillars – not just within IT teams, but also communicating these priorities with the wider business.
Supply chain reconfiguration in the Americas
Alongside its Re:Nissan strategy, Nissan has announced significant changes to its manufacturing and supply chain footprint in the Americas in the past 12 months. Such changes include the closure of the CIVAC plant and the COMPAS plant in Mexico, consolidating production at its complex in Aguascalientes.
Smith noted that while the movement of models is not new in itself, the pace at which the supply chain had to transform was a new challenge that required Nissan's IT teams had to adapt quickly to support the shift and the reoptimisation of logistics.
Where previously teams might have had months to negotiate with suppliers and work with them, the accelerated nature of this transformation meant that orders, shipments and parts had to be integrated rapidly into logistics planning.
As well as setting up EDI connections and communication standards, another challenge that IT teams at Nissan needed to overcome was within the actual system itself, as the Frontier model was integrated with other vehicles.
"We had to modify scheduling, sequencing systems and all these other systems that were currently supporting the existing models within the plant – all the existing material handling flows, we had to adapt those systems – and even to some degree create new applications to allow that integration to take place," said Smith. "We did that at breakneck speed and it was incredible; we had to accelerate our development schedule, we had to accelerate our testing schedule in a lot of ways – we had to do some testing literally in production."
Data foundations underpinning Nissan's AI ambitions
Smith also outlined how Nissan is building the data infrastructure needed to support the next phase of its digital transformation. With several OEMs exploring the potential of AI, he stressed that success depends on first creating a strong data foundation.
Nissan has spent several years centralising supply chain data from across the business, extracting information from legacy systems and making it available through a common data lake. While centralising data was initially a difficult investment to justify because the benefits would not be immediate, Smith described the resulting data assets as a "gold mine" and said the work has enabled Nissan to move beyond traditional reporting and towards more predictive applications.
"We're looking at AI models that allow us to react to conditions that might lead to a situation rather than reacting to something that's already happened," he said, pointing to use cases in inventory management and supplier-risk analysis.
According to Smith, the supply chain has become Nissan's most mature data environment after several years of investment, creating a blueprint that can now be applied to manufacturing operations. Nissan is now looking to replicate the same approach in manufacturing by integrating data from manufacturing execution, quality and traceability systems.
The longer-term goal is to combine manufacturing and supply chain data to uncover new opportunities for optimisation across the end-to-end operation.
Focus on manufacturing analytics and S&OP
Looking ahead to the future, Smith identified two key priorities on Nissan's IT roadmap. The first is accelerating the use of AI and analytics within manufacturing, particularly around quality data, where early pilots have already demonstrated significant potential.
The second is the company's ongoing sales and operations planning (S&OP) transformation. Smith shared his belief that enhanced demand-sensing and scenario-planning capabilities will help Nissan better align vehicle production, inventory and customer demand, giving leadership greater visibility when making planning decisions.
"There is so much appetite to look for a better way to achieve those goals," he said. "I'm really excited because the business is excited."
