Aston Martin; Daimler Truck
Building the muscle of supply chain resilience to operate under uncertainty is a daily discipline, say leaders at Aston Martin and Daimler Truck
From a boutique carmaker rebuilding its supply chain from the ground up to a global truck manufacturer institutionalising risk management at scale, two very different companies are converging on the same conclusion that resilience is a daily discipline that demands data, cross-functional authority, and the courage to rebuild from fundamentals. Martin Corner of Aston Martin and Marion Gillich of Daimler Truck share how they are making it work.
It would be premature to argue that supply chain transformation across the automotive sector has fully moved beyond reactive crisis management to become a core strategic function shaping executive decision-making. However, at Aston Martin and Daimler Truck, that shift is being pursued.
Martin Corner, executive director of supply chain management and logistics at Aston Martin, and Marion Gillich, head of supply chain resilience management at Daimler Truck, are working to pivot the needle – embedding the muscle of supply chain management, and with it resilience, into corporate strategy and positioning supply chain as a driver of business outcomes rather than a responder to disruption.
Across two very different operating models, both leaders have overseen organisational change designed to elevate supply chain from execution engine to orchestrator. Their approaches point to a common conviction that resilience must be built as a daily discipline – one that strengthens performance and sharpens decision-making rather than constraining it.
Corner, who joined Aston Martin in 2022, described the operational challenge at the Automotive Logistics & Supply Chain Europe conference in March 2025. “We’ve delivered over 10 launches in the last two years,” he said, describing a cadence far removed from his experience at higher-volume manufacturers. For a low-volume, ultra-luxury carmaker, that acceleration created complexity across engineering change, supplier capacity and logistics flows, demanding a fundamental redesign of planning and control.
Though, the context is distinctive. As Corner noted in a separate interview, Aston Martin is “a very engineering and design led organisation for that ultra luxury feel,” with high levels of bespoke content and limited leverage with suppliers because “our annual volume is far less than most OEMs’ weekly volume”. That combination amplifies volatility and weakens traditional economies of scale.
By late 2025, after nine months of embedding a formal sales and operations planning (S&OP) process, Corner acknowledged that “the volatility in our business planning has been very high”. Yet he also pointed to a structural breakthrough: “For the first time we’ve got a very joined-up forward plan which operates on a rolling basis”. The new S&OP cycle, spanning demand, production, finance and supplier capacity, has shifted the company from reactive corrections to structured, data-led trade-offs.
At Daimler Truck, Gillich’s remit was designed from the outset to embed resilience into everyday operations. “The risk is real and really persistent,” she said during a January 2026 Automotive Logistics livestream, arguing that risk management can no longer rely on periodic reviews or post-event response plans. Instead, she described a model built on continuous monitoring, supplier transparency and pre-positioned mitigation options.
She also warned that financial stress across the supplier base is becoming more protracted. “We see another thing that’s happening is that insolvencies are taking more time,” she noted, explaining that drawn-out proceedings require OEMs to sustain support while managing disruption exposure.
Speaking to Automotive Logistics across conferences, livestreams, and interviews throughout 2025 and into early 2026, both leaders return to the same conviction: that resilience can drive competitive advantage – and those willing to invest in structured planning, transparency and cross-functional control will be better placed to withstand whatever the next shock brings.
Establishing data infrastructure for decision support
Both Corner and Gillich identify data infrastructure as foundational to effective resilience management – not as a technology objective in itself, but as a prerequisite for disciplined, collective decision-making.
At Daimler Truck, Gillich described resilience management as a process of turning visibility into action. “We’re looking into how we can better use the supply chain data that we have and turn it into actionable items,” she said. That means creating transparency across tiers, clustering risk exposure and translating insight into concrete measures with buyers and supplier managers. As she puts it, the shift in risk management is towards continuous monitoring and pre-positioned options rather than periodic reviews and reactive plans.
At Aston Martin, building that foundation required cultural as well as technical change. When Corner joined the company, planning operated largely at the vehicle level. Feature-level complexity was not embedded in the model. As he explained, “We were planning at car level without any of the features or take rates built into the modelling,” citing the example of 56 wiring harness variants on a single model.
The response was to rebuild planning discipline from the ground up. “We first built up the controls in terms of planning at car and feature level, sticking to sequence,” he said. That granular shift stabilised production by aligning material requirements to actual specification mix rather than headline volumes.
The more strategic change was the introduction of a formal, end-to-end S&OP cycle, beginning with demand and concluding with a cross-functional review. As Corner outlined, the cycle “starts with a demand meeting with sales and ends with supply chain sales and finance, making the proposal for the next 18 month rolling forecast”. Crucially, “it’s built up on data, transparent information on stock levels in the market, retail trajectory trends,” shifting the company “from being, I’d say, a production-based focus to an end-to-end process”. When external shocks arrived, the established S&OP framework enabled a coordinated response at leadership level rather than fragmented reactions.
Developing scenario planning capabilities
While data infrastructure enables visibility, both executives emphasised that resilience in 2026 requires preparation for rapid execution rather than attempting to perfect predictive models. “Risk management isn’t about the last percent of perfecting your forecast,” Gillich said. “It is really about being prepared to take decisions fast because you cannot avoid risk… but you can make sure that the impact of that risk is then reduced by having that scenario already played through and having your scenario playbook ready”.
The approach to scenario preparation varies based on organisational scale and supply chain characteristics. At Daimler Truck, Gillich's team employs "risk-based clustering" to prioritise supply chain mapping and mitigation effort. Commodities are segmented according to exposure to critical raw materials; suppliers are assessed by location, including ESG and country risk profiles; and value-at-risk analysis identifies nodes with the greatest potential business impact. The objective is not blanket visibility at any cost, but prioritised transparency aligned to financial and operational exposure.
For Aston Martin, operating at lower volumes, the challenges differ but require similar strategic thinking. "We have something like 650 collection points for inbound logistics," Corner noted. "Only 22 of them warrant what we would call a full truckload or FTL-style flow”. This supply base fragmentation complicates traditional just-in-time approaches. With low volumes and highly specialised content, the company must weigh the cost of holding inventory against the risk of obsolescence – particularly for components such as carbon fibre parts with short lifecycles.
Addressing these constraints required partnership with logistics providers to optimise groupage and milk-run operations. But more fundamentally, it has required a recalibration of priorities. “For Aston Martin, it makes more sense to ensure that your supply chain is robust and resilient than it is lean and efficient,” Corner argued, “because the sensitivity of one lost car for Aston Martin is so high”.
Extending visibility beyond first-tier suppliers
Both executives emphasised the growing importance of extended visibility, noting that achieving deep, Tier-N transparency ultimately depends on a strong foundation of trust. “The partnership between the OEMs and the suppliers is super important, especially when it comes to data sharing,” Gillich said. “You need to have the trust and the transparency on how this data that you’re sharing amongst each other is being used”. In practice, that often requires legal frameworks and non-disclosure agreements that protect commercially sensitive information while allowing aggregated risk assessment.
Several OEMs have begun to institutionalise this approach. General Motors de México is investing in full Tier-N supply chain mapping, including critical minerals and raw materials, to identify vulnerabilities and support real-time risk management. Nissan has established a Tier-N Sourcing Digital Platform where over 94% of its parts suppliers in the Americas have provided supply chain data under confidentiality agreements, enabling advance identification of potential disruptions.
Adapting inventory strategies for current risk profiles
The discussion of resilience approaches inevitably also addresses inventory strategy and the applicability of just-in-time principles in current market conditions. Both executives argue against binary choices between lean and buffered approaches, instead advocating for strategic differentiation based on risk assessment.
“[Just-in-time] has to be used differently and more strategically than it has been before,” Gillich said. Working capital discipline remains essential, she stressed, but companies must “really think where we need to have some more stock buffering”.
That buffering, in her view, should be selective and risk-based. “This can be, for example, semicons,” she noted. “These are small parts. It’s not that you must have a huge warehouse ready for it”. The physical space requirements for strategic semiconductor inventory, for instance, remain manageable while significantly reducing vulnerability to supply disruption, at least short- to mid-term.
Additionally, strategic inventory doesn't necessarily concentrate at the OEM level. "Stock buffering... doesn't have to happen on the OEM side. It can also happen on the tier-one or tier-two side," Gillich noted. "But again, it needs to be a joint decision where you need to work together to optimise, of course, the working capital as well." This collaborative approach to inventory positioning requires alignment on risk management objectives across the supply chain.
Corner described how Aston Martin implemented an integrated logistics approach with DHL covering "from the part supplier to our line side." This end-to-end partnership includes introducing "a digital lead logistics provider solution which utilises their full collection network and allows them to do real time transport planning with our live demand and optimise combinations of flows and groupage and of deliveries and collections."
The system addresses Aston Martin's fragmented supplier base – an inbound network of roughly 650 collection points, with only a small proportion generating full truckload volumes. In practice, the technology enables the logistics provider to optimise consolidation and routing decisions in real time based on current demand signals.
The broader strategic question is where to prioritise efficiency and where to build resilience. As General Motors’ executive director of global logistics and containers put it, the challenge is knowing “where to be lean and where to be robust” – preserving just-in-time systems where supply chains are stable, while investing in added capacity and buffers for critical or vulnerable components.
Integrating supply chain into strategic decision-making
Both executives describe an evolution in how supply chain functions participate in business strategy development. Corner articulated a vision where "supply chain is a function that takes the brand and the product portfolio and converts it into a value chain platform that then executes the physical production and then delivers it to the customer... It creates a full business model, and it orchestrates that business model."
This type of expanded role encompasses total cost of ownership analysis and influence over sourcing footprint decisions, rather than simply executing procurement strategies determined elsewhere. "That end-to-end understanding of the lead times from start to finish is really important and that in the end will help steer some of the other things like long term supplier footprint, managing the end-to-end landed costs," Corner explained. The objective is ensuring "the supply chain is geared towards our business, geared towards our volumes and geared towards our customer promise".
This strategic positioning proved operationally valuable during 2025's market volatility. "The volatility again as curveball does, meant we've had to make... two or three big adjustments to our plan," Corner noted, as market conditions shifted. With a formal S&OP cadence in place, those decisions were taken with cross-functional visibility rather than in isolation. “At least we’re staring at that now on a regular basis and we are projecting scenarios and creating decisions that are based on facts and data,” he said.
Gillich emphasises that effective resilience requires embedding capabilities within organisational processes rather than relying on ad-hoc crisis response. Organisations must be "learning to operate under uncertainty," she noted. "The organisations have to institutionalise resilience... because they need to keep selling and they're building that muscle." This involves transitioning from periodic risk assessments to continuous monitoring systems, and from reactive incident management to proactive scenario development.
Measuring progress and future directions
Both executives view current challenges as accelerating necessary capability development. "Every crisis is also a chance," Gillich noted. "We're at this point where we're learning to use the muscles... But we’ll come out stronger from it if we also take the crisis seriously."
Successive shocks – from semiconductor shortages to tariff volatility to supplier financial distress – have accelerated the adoption of capabilities that were emerging priorities several years ago. Tier-N mapping, scenario planning frameworks, cross-functional S&OP processes, and total cost of ownership analysis are transitioning from pilot initiatives to operational requirements. As Gillich observed, "the crisis that we see right now can actually support... layering the digital foundations and scaling digital solutions much faster."
At Aston Martin, Corner's team continues developing strategic capabilities alongside operational improvements. At the March 2026 Automotive Logistics & Supply Chain Europe conference, as the company accelerates the launch of the Valhalla hypercar, he will address optimising inventory and working capital by analysing which bespoke vehicle features generate customer value versus those that add supply chain complexity without commensurate return. This reflects progression from establishing basic planning discipline to strategic value chain optimisation.
Operational metrics reflect that progress. Over three years, Aston Martin has reduced vehicle delivery times, improved production plan adherence, sharply cut component shortages and lowered logistics costs – all while launching over 10 new vehicle models and derivatives. The cultural shift is equally significant. “When we see the respect that supply chain now has in the company compared to when we joined, we are at the top table,” Corner said. “We are involved in the business transformation programme as a key stakeholder for the CEO and Executive Committee”.
The experiences at Aston Martin and Daimler Truck, despite their different operating scales and business models, demonstrate converging approaches to supply chain resilience and management. Both organisations have implemented data infrastructure that supports decision-making, established cross-functional processes that integrate supply chain into strategic planning, and developed scenario planning capabilities that enable rapid response to external volatility.
The shift from viewing supply chain as primarily an execution function to recognising its role in strategic orchestration represents a fundamental change in how automotive companies approach operational planning. As supply chain leaders gain influence in business decision-making – what Corner describes as having "a seat at the top table" – they bring analytical capabilities and end-to-end visibility that enable more informed trade-offs between cost, resilience, and market responsiveness.
In an operating environment characterised by ongoing geopolitical, regulatory, and market volatility, this integration of supply chain expertise into strategic decision-making has become a competitive requirement rather than an operational preference.
