Enhancing the supply chain with composite materials: An analysis supported by IT tools in coach/bus manufacturing

Composite materials, also known as fiber reinforced polymers (FRPs), possess advantageous properties like stiffness, light weight and resistance to corrosion that surpass that of traditional materials. Composite materials may give manufacturing companies the opportunity to improve the technical specifications of a component/structure and also impact the configuration of the supply chain. A European-based coach/bus manufacturer is used to investigate the enhancements the adoption of composite materials can bring to the manufacturing operations and the supply chain associated to the production to the panel of an engine hatch. The bill of materials is used to map its supply chain and identify supplier links and total number of operations. A proposed solution comprises the use of carbon fiber to replace traditional materials to reduce nested operations from 28 to 10 and total parts from 17 to 9. A customized software tool is used to generate a graphic representation and identify potential suppliers from a database. The results support the idea of adopting composite materials to enhance the technical specifications of the part studied, reduce the number of operations and also rationalize the manufacturing supply chain.