What’s Chipping Away at Automotive Production?
The latest challenge: semiconductor shortages that threaten to slow the industry's recovery. How long will the shortages last? What can automakers do?
Success requires embracing a new mindset, new products, and new ways of working. BCG has the experience and global presence to partner with the auto industry to transform today’s leaders and empower the game-changers of tomorrow.
It’s one of the most disruptive periods the automotive industry has ever experienced, and one of the most exciting. Breakthroughs in electric vehicles, self-driving cars, vehicle connectivity, and other automotive innovations—along with ridesharing and new business models—aren’t just affecting the industry. They’re poised to change the world.
Over the last hundred years, vehicular mobility has been the engine that transforms society—but companies throughout the automotive industry still have much further to travel. Some of the most significant issues they’re facing are helping to create a cleaner world, improving safety by reducing traffic accidents, and making mobility more accessible and more equitable for all.
Companies need to act on these challenges—and act now. They must transform their operations to be more efficient and sustainable while adopting new business models to respond faster to competition and shifting demand.
BCG is dedicated to helping transform today’s automotive leaders while empowering the game-changers of tomorrow. We believe that the key to a successful automotive strategy is the ability to reinvent and reshape the industry by quickly scaling and pivoting through new business models and ways of working—whether that means reengineering automotive R&D to embrace new automotive technologies, launching large-scale automotive digital transformation projects, or expanding into self-driving cars, mobility services, or other new businesses.
To help our automotive industry clients realize bold ambitions, we draw on a deep well of knowledge and experience and a global team of specialized automotive consultants.
BCG helps automotive industry clients analyze how major industry trends affect their business. Our automotive strategy specialists have deep industry experience and are located in major auto markets around the world. We use issue-specific diagnostics, toolkits, and benchmarks to help clients strategize and prioritize. Then we help them determine how and when to adopt new approaches, products, and ways of working by partnering with them to turn those ideas into concrete actions.
Our work spans the entire automotive value chain—from corporate strategy and shareholder value creation to functional improvement programs and full-scale organization redesigns.
In addition to our functional work, we’ve built six centers to drive automotive-specific products and innovation:
The Center for Climate Change & Electrification is the hub for our work on electric vehicle markets and strategies and our work assessing EVs’ impact on energy, infrastructure, and related industries. We use a comprehensive set of tools to help clients evaluate market opportunities, ROI expectations, and manufacturing requirements as well as to analyze competition and industry regulation.
In the Center for Product Creation in Automotive, we help auto companies analyze consumer preferences and behaviors to optimize product offerings and portfolios and maximize growth and returns. We use a comprehensive suite of tools to manage product life cycles and costs. Our platform architecture and technology roadmaps allow us to keep pace with customer demands while maintaining capital efficiency.
The Center for Operations in Automotive houses our work with clients that want to fine-tune their automotive manufacturing and supply chain for the future. We guide clients using best-in-class tools such as model factories, mobile labs, technology demonstrations, and advanced analytics to help them develop new products, tools, and partner ecosystems.
The Center for Sales & Marketing in Automotive brings BCG best practices in sales and marketing to auto industry clients. We help clients with projects in digital automotive marketing, omnichannel and e-commerce sales, and pricing and incentive management. To accomplish this, our experts work with an arsenal of marketing, sales, and pricing tools and analytics.
The Center for Digital in Automotive helps auto companies build digital business strategies, end-to-end digital transformations, and Car 4.0 technologies such as autonomous vehicles and electric vehicles. It’s how we help clients adopt key digital enablers such as data platforms, artificial intelligence, and advanced analytics and new ways of working such as agile and becoming a bionic company. In this work, we partner with DigitalBCG for digital transformations, as well as BCG Platinion, BCG GAMMA, and BCG Digital Ventures.
The Center for Mobility Innovation covers the new wave of mobility products and services that are moving beyond the automobile, including intermodal platforms, mobility services, public transportation, logistics services, and smart infrastructure.
The latest challenge: semiconductor shortages that threaten to slow the industry's recovery. How long will the shortages last? What can automakers do?
Digital-age car buyers will favor customer-centric vehicles that can be personalized and updated just like a smartphone. Automakers must transform to tap this lucrative opportunity.
