About Geely
Geely Holding Group is one of the world’s leading automotive groups, with brands including Volvo Cars, Polestar, Lotus and Zeekr, and a production and sales footprint that reaches well beyond China. Building vehicles involves tens of thousands of parts and a vast supplier base — so the efficiency of the parts supply network directly sets the pace and cost of vehicle production.
The challenge
Automotive parts supply chains are multi-tier, multi-node and heavily constrained. Suppliers are widely dispersed, and parts pass through consolidation, warehousing and distribution before arriving at the plant in sequence. As the number of models and plants grew, a network designed largely on experience began to show its limits:
- There was no quantitative basis for how many parts warehouses to run, or where.
- Supplier–warehouse–plant service relationships were too complex to evaluate cost and lead time as a whole.
- Adding a plant or model rippled through the entire network, and manual analysis couldn’t compare enough alternatives.
The solution
Convect provided its network design solution. First, the parts network was captured as one unified model: suppliers, parts warehouses and vehicle plants as entities; supply relationships, lanes, warehouse capacity and service times as the relationships and constraints between them. The optimization engine then solved for, across the whole network:
- Network footprint: how many parts warehouses to operate and where.
- Service assignments: which warehouse serves each supplier and each plant.
- Flows: how parts move between nodes to minimize total transport cost while meeting lead-time requirements.
Network planners can build and compare scenarios — a new plant, a supplier change, a warehouse consolidation — using data rather than intuition to support network decisions.
Results
With Convect, Geely built a multi-tier automotive parts network that efficiently connects upstream suppliers with its vehicle plants and coordinates production and logistics resources — improving operational efficiency while significantly reducing transport cost, and giving the company a decision tool it can keep using as its manufacturing footprint evolves.
