Turning supply chain disruption into competitive advantage at GM, Schaeffler, and Toyota

As supply chain disruptions grow more frequent, more interconnected and harder to predict, the automotive industry is being forced to confront a fundamental question: is logistics still a cost to be managed, or has it become a lever that determines whether a business wins or loses? At the ALSC Europe 2026 conference, leaders from General Motors, Schaeffler, Maersk, Toyota Motor Europe and Kinaxis discussed how they are turning these disruptions into competitive advantage.

The organisations that are best placed to navigate what comes next are not necessarily the ones with the largest networks or the most sophisticated technology. They are the ones that have done the harder, slower work of embedding logistics into strategy, building trust across functions and with partners, and treating every crisis not as an emergency to survive but as data to learn from.

From service function to solutions centre

Marcio Lucon, executive director of global logistics and containers at General Motors, has spent the past 18 months ensuring logistics has a seat at the strategy table at GM as a function that shapes decisions, he told Christopher Ludwig, AL's chief content officer, in fireside chat today.

The evidence that this shift is having a material impact comes in two forms. The first is crisis management: with the decision-makers being in the room early enough to have time to react, rather than being the last to know. The second is cost: after five consecutive years of logistics cost increases, GM saw a significant reduction from 2024 into 2026, driven by the logistics function sitting in the right conversations at the right time and driving enterprise decisions rather than function-only wins.

The asset network question has become more complex as stability itself has become harder to find. Lucon outlined how this can be solved through granular customisation, where a specific strategy is broken down by plant, by product and by country, and assessed continuously rather than fixed at programme launch.

In the last 12 months, parts of the network have shifted from asset-heavy to asset-light as volatility has increased. The guiding principle on network design is to build where you sell, buy where you build. But, applying it requires logistics to be embedded in decisions long before production begins.

On vehicle logistics specifically, GM is piloting an end-to-end damage data collection programme designed to give complete visibility of every vehicle identification number at every point in the journey, with the goal of moving from managing quality claims by exception to having a full picture in a common system. The target is to deploy this across several hundred finished vehicle logistics nodes in North America.

Container and packaging management has also been centralised under one organisation for the first time, with packaging engineers now acting as key approvers at initial gate reviews for new programmes, ensuring that how a part will be moved is considered at the same moment as how it will be made.

The proof point: Schaeffler and Maersk

Dr Nadine Kiratli-Schneider, head of supply chain risk management and sustainability at Schaeffler, opened her presentation by stating that "supply chain disruptions are not new.” "What is new is the intensity in which they're occurring and the frequency in which they're occurring."

Since 2023, Schaeffler has run a dedicated supply chain risk management function built to identify risks using external data, assess their relevance to Schaeffler's specific flows, and respond before disruption becomes a production problem. The three principles that have guided it include:

Never waste a good crisis.

After the crisis is before the crisis.

It is better together.

Annick Verhoeven, head of product at Maersk described the shift in framing that made the partnership work - moving away from measuring success through transport cost alone and towards total cost of ownership.

The cost of disruption like working capital locked in inflated inventory, production stops, emergency freight and contract penalties sits across the company, not just in the transport budget. Making that case internally at Schaeffler, and to Maersk's own teams, was the requirement for everything that followed.

As a part of that partnership, it meant Maersk committing to a delivery date and taking full operational responsibility for achieving it, regardless of the disruptions encountered along the way.

For Kiratli-Schneider's team, the operational impact is immediate. "Every morning, my team does risk screening to see what's going on in the world. Whenever we see that Maersk is taking care of a lane because we have the service booked on it, we can immediately drop it and move on to the next case."

The partnership required “a lot of trust," Kiratli-Schneider said. "In the beginning, it was like: are we serious about this, or not? Can we say these things, or is this going to hurt us?" The answer was to open the doors anyway, establish performance as a qualifier, and build connections across multiple levels of both organisations until the relationship became structural rather than dependent on individuals.

What partnership actually requires, beyond the crisis

Jean-Christophe Deville, vice president of supply chain at Toyota Motor Europe, stated that if resilience, as the dictionary defines it, is the ability of a body to spring back to its previous condition after a shock, then for Toyota it has no meaning. "We've learned more in the last five years than in the previous 15," he said.

His point on just-in-time was also direct. "Just in time costs a lot of money. But it's a fantastic university for learnings, because it's exposing our weaknesses all the time." Toyota's investment is weighted heavily towards planning and forecasting accuracy - better demand matching upstream - rather than track-and-trace tools for managing the consequences of planning failures.

The goal is to reduce the 50% of production that currently goes to parking rather than directly to customers, representing billions in working capital tied up in finished inventory. "99% of the improvements exist at home," he said, "and 1% is really outside."

On partnership, Deville mentioned three things key areas which should be practiced: bad news first, mutual trust, long-term vision. The bad news principle is foundational. "If I go back home with the problems and the reaction is I'm being bashed and paying penalties, what do I do the day after? I don't talk about it."

He gave an example of how mutual trust came to play just six weeks before the Paris Olympic Games. Thousands of Toyota vehicles ready for delivery were destroyed in a hailstorm north of the city. "We went to logistics partners and said: we cannot waste any minutes talking about quotations, cycle times, costs. Bring as many people as you can. We will bring people from all around the world and we're going to be 24/7." Six weeks later it was resolved. "You went into the crisis with us and you saved us. Next time you have a problem, we'll be there."

Luiz Solia, global vice president and industry principal at Kinaxis, reframed what AI can and cannot contribute to this picture. It can only raise the ceiling to a certain extent. What matters more is how quickly an organisation can sense a developing problem, predict its impact across the supply chain, and identify what needs to be done. "It's not about a more accurate plan," he said. "It's about how quickly can you recover."

The vision he described is a digital twin of the supply chain in which AI can simulate scenarios, surface implications across financial as well as operational dimensions, and accelerate the human decision-making process and not replace it. "AI becomes the orchestrator," he said. "It's a fusion of different techniques that AI knows and can leverage."

Kiratli-Schneider closed the session with a reflection on what the Schaeffler journey had taught her about the mathematics of collaboration. "When previously 1+1+1 was adding up to 3, it was good enough to have people just joining a room. Now if you don't have the right mindset in the people joining that room, 1+1+1 might actually be two, because you're missing out on stuff. These are wicked problems…there's not one single right answer, and part of the answer lies in different functions. You need to bring both together with the right mindset so that 1+1+1 is five."

Is the industry actually getting better at resilience?

After years of disruption, crises and hard lessons, has the automotive supply chain genuinely changed or is it still fundamentally reactive? - This was the theme of the closing panel discussion with Agnieszka Kubiak, senior vice president of logistics at Brose Group, Peter Gyurcsek, vice president at 4flow, and Alfonso Rodriguez of Zero Motorcycles.

"We learned quite a lot already," Kubiak said. "But what really matters is how quickly we are learning."

Gyurcsek identified the clearest dividing line between the leaders and the rest - whether resilience has been embedded as a permanent operating model or remains a response to specific events. "When companies consciously invest into early warning capabilities and AI-driven workflows, resilience becomes part of how they operate — not a reaction to a given risk." The companies not doing this, he argued, are exposed in a way they may not fully appreciate, particularly when cost pressure tempts them to cut what looks like overhead. 

"I look at resilience as an insurance premium. You can cut the funding and have a cost saving immediately. But on the mid to long term, it will come back and hurt you and the impact will probably be at least twice as high as what you eventually saved," he said. 

At Brose, purchasing and supply chain now share the same conversation about total landed cost, rather than operating from separate agendas with conflicting KPIs. "We are not talking only about the movement of goods anymore. We are talking about going to the insights, having full information, driving the change," Kubiak noted. 

Rodriguez reinforced the point from the other direction by drawing on Zero Motorcycles' experience of moving manufacturing offshore to reduce unit cost, only to find that the resulting eight-month reactionary lead time made the supply chain fundamentally more fragile, not more efficient. "The mindset of lowering cost by producing out of the country feels very palpable immediately," he said. "But then you become less resilient."

On culture, the panel echoed that bad news shared early is not a threat but the earliest form of resilience. "Opposite from using bad news as leverage against your partners," Rodriguez said, "you need to use it as a token of appreciation. Thank you for the trust you have in us to bring that information over. How can we figure this problem out together?"