COVID-19: How we support companies in their international operations

Thanks to our international presence, multidisciplinary teams, and decades of fruitful collaboration with major automotive players, SNECI facilitates and improves the relationship between automakers (at large, i.e. not only car markers but also producers of trucks & buses) and their overseas’ suppliers. 

If there was one word to describe our company, it could be a “bridge”. SNECI is deeply rooted in both the mainland of major auto manufacturers and the extraterrestrial islands of their suppliers. Below the bridge flows the river of miscommunication, customer-specific requirements, quality or logistic dilemmas, and differences in languages and time zones. We help automotive companies overcome all these issues.

With the COVID-19 crisis bringing all international travel to a stop, several of our clients have turned to SNECI’s local offices to represent them internationally. The goal is to either support their business development with their customers abroad or help manage their foreign suppliers.

Developing business abroad

As the sales team cannot travel to meet with their customers, companies need a local agent to help them develop business abroad.

Sure, we are all experts of Microsoft Teams or ZOOM now, but nothing replaces a physical contact. It is because many business agreements are reached through face to face meetings that the business travel was so popular until early 2020.

Our local sales teams, based in France, Slovakia, Poland, Russia, China, Korea, Morocco, and now Turkey, allow our customers to continue their sales efforts and even book new businesses. These cost-efficient solutions can also bring down travel costs as well as carbon footprint (at a time when the world is becoming more and more conscious about this topic).

For French companies, that cost can get even lower. SNECI has been recently approved by the French government as a provider of export services (“Chèque Relance Export”). This allows small and medium-sized companies to benefit from a subsidy to finance part of the following services from SNECI: advisory on export strategy, market study, commercial prospecting.

Managing your foreign suppliers

The other major trend that has risen during the COVID-19 crisis is related to industrial companies that can’t audit or manage their foreign suppliers any more. How can you ensure a fair audit of a supplier in Russia or China, when you are more than 10 000 km away?

Several OEMs and Tier1 suppliers have come to us to take advantage of our local auditors and Supplier Quality Engineers established worldwide to provide these audits and coaching missions.

Over the past six months, we have started several new large projects in Russia, China, and Turkey for three different OEMs that have put us in charge of managing their pool of suppliers (up to several hundred) within each country.

Tier1 suppliers facing the same issues have asked us to audit and upgrade the quality of their Tier2 suppliers in China, Korea, and Slovakia.

We have even placed local Production, Quality, and Project Experts directly in the plants of the most crucial suppliers to quickly improve the quality of the parts and the communications with their client. It has also allowed us to ensure a smooth ramp-up of the projects while implementing Lean Manufacturing on the production sites of the suppliers.

Interested ? Please feel free to contact us.