Red Sofa interview
Watch: Volkswagen de México sharpens its supply chain resilience strategy amid rising volatility
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Peter Koltai shared how Volkswagen has redesigned its supply chain strategy post-2020, moving from a purely efficiency-driven model to one built on resilience, visibility and proactive risk management.
At the Automotive Logistics & Supply Chain Mexico conference, Peter Koltai, head of logistics & production control at Volkswagen de México, outlined how the carmaker has restructured its supply chain model to operate in a far more unpredictable environment.
The post-2020 landscape, he said, required a decisive pivot from traditional efficiency-driven processes toward resilience, redundancy and dynamic visibility.
Koltai described unprecedented shocks that exposed fragilities in global and regional flows. “Last year our major deliveries from South America were showing delays of up to four weeks… some vessels were even overtaking each other on the Atlantic Ocean,” he noted.
Such volatility forced Volkswagen to increase safety stocks in targeted areas and establish dual sourcing arrangements to mitigate exposure. “We were forced to redesign many of our supply chain solutions… we had to increase our stocks and look for additional partners,” he said.
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While these measures introduced additional cost, the company remains committed to core factory KPIs. “The major KPIs for a factory do not change… our focus is stable production and keeping cost targets,” Koltai emphasised.
To offset the cost of resilience, the team intensified reviews of operational processes and supplier contracts, ensuring alignment with real-time market conditions.
Koltai praised Mexico’s flexible port and service-provider ecosystem, which often helps compensate for persistent transport challenges such as road blockages or weekend delivery constraints. Early planning, he stressed, remains essential.
A major breakthrough has been Volkswagen’s digital transformation of supplier monitoring. “Day by day we are looking at all the data we can collect… several times we were able to identify critical situations before suppliers communicated them,” he said.
Koltai concluded that building talent with a resilient, data-driven mindset is now central to sustaining competitiveness in Mexico’s rapidly evolving industrial landscape.
