Jaguar Land Rover awards its top ten suppliers in the inaugural Supplier Excellence Awards.

• New annual awards programme underlines importance of supply chain
• Top ten production suppliers recognised for performance and flexibility
• Jaguar Land Rover asks its suppliers to gear up for future growth

Jaguar Land Rover has recognised its top ten direct production suppliers at the company’s inaugural Supplier Excellence Awards.  Companies from Corby to Cairo were presented with trophies by British actress, Joanna Lumley, at a ceremony held in the West Midlands, the heart of the company’s UK operations.

Explaining the rationale for the new award programme, Ian Harnett, Jaguar Land Rover Director of Human Resources and Purchasing, said:  “These awards recognise the role that our supply chain plays in meeting our business objectives and celebrate the achievements of companies that have excelled on quality, delivery, cost and absolute certainty of supply. 

We are also saying a special thank you to those supplier facilities that have shown “Above and Beyond” flexibility, or have worked quickly to meet production or design challenges.”

A total of ten trophies were presented for performance in 2014:  two gold, four silver and four bronze.  The awards went to individual plants or facilities, rewarding on-time delivery, continuous quality, accreditation to international and Jaguar Land Rover standards and flexibility to meet the company’s developing needs.  

Over the past five years, Jaguar Land Rover has doubled sales and employment, tripled turnover, and invested over £10 billion in new product creation and capital expenditure.    In 2014 it opened its first major overseas manufacturing site in China and laid the foundation stone for its new Brazilian plant, which will open next year.  

The company’s innovation is continuous, with 50 major new and model-year upgrade product launches planned for the next five years, offering increased opportunity for its supply base.

Ian Harnett continued:  “Jaguar Land Rover is gearing up for the future and we need our suppliers to do the same, enabling us to deliver class-leading vehicles to our customer base across the globe. 

The ten facilities recognised through our first annual Excellence Awards are the leading examples of how our strong supply base is stepping up to the mark.”  

Jaguar Land Rover chose to award individual supplier locations, rather than overall groups, in recognition of the importance of a close working relationship with each facility, founded on principles of integrity, honesty and trust.  As a reflection of its approach to supplier relations, Jaguar Land Rover was named most trustworthy OEM in a recent study conducted by global information and analytics provider, IHS Automotive.

The winners of the Jaguar Land Rover 2015 Supplier Excellence Awards were:

Gold

Continental Automotive Systems Slovakia s.r.o. at Zvolen (brake calipers for the Jaguar XF, XJ and F TYPE).

Brembo Poland Sp.z.o.o. at Dabrowa Gornicza  (brake discs for the Range Rover, Range Rover Sport, Discovery and Defender).

Silver

Autoliv BKI at La Pobla De Vallbona, Spain (part of the Swedish Autoliv Group, the world’s largest automotive safety supplier, which supplies airbags, seat belts and both passive and active safety systems).

ZF Lemforder UK Ltd at Solihull (corner assemblies, including suspension, driveshaft and brake assemblies for many Land Rover models).

Trelleborg ForshedaZF Lemforder AB, Sweden (mass dampers for all Jaguar Land Rover vehicles and lines, part of the Trelleborg Vibracoustic Group, a strategic supplier to Jaguar Land Rover for engine mounts).

Maxion Wheels Italia, S.r.l., at Dello near Brescia (alloy wheels for many Jaguar Land Rover vehicles, including Range Rover, Range Rover Sport, Range Rover Evoque and Jaguar XF.  Part of the Lochpe Maxion Group, headquartered in Brazil.)

Bronze

Leoni Wiring Systems Egypt S.A.E. in Cairo (wiring harnesses for Discovery, Defender and Jaguar F-TYPE vehicles.  Part of the Leoni group, headquartered in Germany, which produces technically sophisticated products, from single-core automotive cables through to complete wiring systems with integrated electronics).

Denso Manufacturing UK, Telford plant (heating, ventilation and air conditioning units for the Range Rover and Range Rover Sport vehicles as well as the latest range of Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles from our lightweight aluminium architecture).

Robert Bosch GmbH at Ansbach, Germany (part of Bosch’s Automotive Electronics business division, the Ansbach plant is the global lead for the production of restraint control electronics).

Benteler Automotive UK Ltd at Corby (part of the Benteler International Group, the Corby site supplies steel sub-frames, control arms and selected chassis components).

Jaguar Land Rover joins consortium to evaluate safer vehicle solutions.

• Jaguar Land Rover to join a consortium founded by MIT AgeLab, DENSO and Touchstone Evaluations to define and deliver safer vehicle HMI solutions
• The new ‘Advanced Human Factors Evaluator for Automotive Distraction’ (AHEAD) consortium will evaluate the demands on driver workload posed by new human machine interface (HMI) technologies to help manufacturers and suppliers design intuitive, convenient and safe future systems
• The involvement with the AHEAD consortium further strengthens Jaguar Land Rover’s work with leading technology businesses and academia to advance its engineering and design capabilities

Jaguar Land Rover is strengthening its engagement with the world’s leading technology businesses and academic bodies with its involvement in a project that aims to reduce the potential for driver distraction in future vehicle human machine interface (HMI) systems.

By joining the AHEAD (Advanced Human Factors Evaluator for Automotive Distraction) consortium, Jaguar Land Rover will be working with MIT AgeLab, DENSO and Touchstone Evaluations on methods for measuring the demands made on drivers by the latest HMI technologies. This will help to determine new systems that will minimise distraction while delivering convenient, intuitive, engaging and safe operation and meeting potential future industry and regulatory requirements.

The consortium brings together leading researchers, vehicle manufacturers and suppliers to take a new look at how the demands of using voice controls, touchscreens and switchgear can be reliably and effectively measured. AHEAD’s goal is to produce a quantifiable, objective evaluation toolkit that can be used across the industry to support new HMI development. This will improve the effectiveness and reliability of data and help manufacturers and electronics suppliers to produce new interfaces that meet all manufacturer, consumer and regulatory requirements.

Jaguar Land Rover’s involvement in AHEAD is the latest in a series of strategic partnerships and academic collaborations that reinforce its research and development of advanced engineering and design capabilities. This is also the first time Jaguar Land Rover has collaborated on a project with MIT.

Dr Wolfgang Epple, Jaguar Land Rover’s Director of Research and Technology, said: “The opportunities to provide drivers with access to comprehensive and sophisticated information and communication systems while at the wheel continue to increase at an exceptional rate. While our vision is that our customers will benefit from the most effective, engaging and responsive in-car technologies, we have to be sure that they can be accessed and operated intuitively and safely, with the minimum distraction.

“Our work with MIT AgeLab, DENSO and our other partners in AHEAD will put us in the forefront of understanding the workload placed on the driver. This will be of crucial importance in our development of the future systems we want to deliver to keep pace with the rapid expansion of vehicle and communications technologies.”

Doug Patton, Senior Vice President of Engineering at DENSO America, Inc, said: “We know drivers want to be connected while driving, but how do we safely give drivers what they want? To do this we need to evaluate driver workload, but currently there isn’t a quantifiable and objective metrology model in place. Not to mention, there’s a high price tag attached to researching and developing something like this. With that said, forming a consortium will help reach the goal of establishing a common methodology.”

The current methods for evaluating HMI technologies mainly use criteria developed before the introduction of modern systems such as voice controls, touchscreens and multi-function controllers. They also don’t take into account the impact of the driver moving between different modes of use, such as vision, touch, sound, haptics, gesture and cognition. AHEAD aims to make it more feasible to evaluate demands at an early prototype stage, when design changes can be made more easily and effectively, rather than later in the vehicle development process.

MIT AgeLab has taken a lead in using multi-dimensional assessment, measuring physiological, visual attention and performance measures as part of its HMI evaluation. Dr Bryan Reimer, Associate Director of the New England University Transportation Center at MIT and the MIT technical lead for AHEAD, explained: “Physiological measures complement traditional visual attention and performance measures to provide a more complete picture of the interacting demands of modern HMI.”