Product development teams of automotive organizations are facing immense challenges to reduce development cost, improve margins and reduce time-to-market for new products. They are increasingly adopting the Global Product Development Strategy to cope with the new changes by shifting a significant part of work to emerging markets.

In increasingly dispersed but globally networked automotive enterprises, managing their supply chain costs to ensure the least landed cost of procured direct parts & indirect materials would be an area of topmost priority for automakers as they struggle with a sluggish economy and intensifying competition. Increased supply chain velocity, greater demand volatility, shorter product life cycles, and growth of global sourcing are posing new challenges to supply chain coordination.

In today's economic scenario, automotive manufacturers are facing competing pressures to reduce manufacturing cost, ensure good quality and comply with strict regulations (TREAD, CAFÉ, ISO 14000, etc). This increases the demand for right strategic actions to holistically manage and optimize operations across the global manufacturing network. Increased focus is required for coordinating production across facilities in order to standardize operations and ensure good product quality.

In an overall recessionary economy, the demand for purchasing new cars is likely to stay suppressed and the lead time from initial interest to actual sale would be longer. In such situations, organizations need to work on improving their Lead to Conversion ratio very aggressively. This would push companies to work on both the quantity as well as the quality of leads in the pipeline and also empower the sales force with readily available, relevant and updated information, so that speed of response against customer queries is satisfactory.

The After Sales business in the automotive industry is becoming increasingly important for the OEMs especially in today's turbulent economic environment. Contrary to the highly profitable after sales business, the profit margins are shrinking considerably in the new car sales business.

With the advancement of sensor and microcontroller technology as well as standardization of communication protocol, electronics control units (ECUs) have become an integral part of any vehicle. These ECUs are commonly used to increase safety of the car, to create more comfort in driving and enabling infotainment inside car