1.5 Automotive stakeholders

The five phases of the previous section describe what happens and in what order. They say nothing about who does it. In the automotive industry the work is divided along two different axes at once — by functional role (the kind of work) and by supply tier (the commercial position in the chain). Confusing the two is a common source of muddle, so this section keeps them separate, then shows how they overlap.

1.5.1 The functional roles

Whichever company employs them, five kinds of work must happen for every moulded part:

• Design studio (industrial design). Owns the early stages: what the product should be and what every visible surface should look like. Its output is styled surfaces and requirements, not fully engineered parts.
• Product engineering. Owns the requirements cascade, the packaging (what fits where), and the engineering-level design of the part. This is where the part's function, material and detailed geometry are settled.
• Toolmaker. Designs and builds the mould. Sometimes an in-house shop, more often an external specialist. Mould-flow analysis may be run by the product engineers, the toolmaker, or both.
• Moulder. Runs the presses. The moulder owns process set-up — the temperatures, pressures and timings that turn a good tool into good parts.
• Validation and quality. Proves the part against its requirements, signs off design changes, and releases it for production.

These are competencies, not companies: a single organisation may hold several of them, and any of them may be bought in.

1.5.2 The supply tiers

The same work is also split commercially, into the classic automotive supply pyramid — defined by who sells to whom:

• OEM — the vehicle maker (BMW, Volkswagen, Toyota). It owns the design studio and the final validation sign-off, keeps substantial product engineering in-house, and buys much of the rest in.
• Tier 1 — sells complete systems or modules directly to the OEM (a whole cockpit, a door panel, a lighting unit). For a moulded part, a Tier 1 usually owns the product engineering, and often the moulding too.
• Tier 2 — sells components or sub-assemblies to a Tier 1, not to the OEM. A specialist contract moulder or a toolmaker is typically a Tier 2.
• Tier 3 — supplies raw materials and commodities: the resin producers (BASF, SABIC), masterbatch, standard fasteners.

Two clarifications complete the picture:

• Moulders and toolmakers are the specialist support structure. Neither sits at the top of the pyramid. The toolmaker is almost always a specialist supplier (typically Tier 2), and the moulder is either the Tier 1 itself or a Tier 2 contract moulder. Together they form the manufacturing base a Tier 1 leans on — and much of the hands-on plastic-parts know-how lives in exactly this layer.
• Software and equipment vendors sit outside the pyramid. The pyramid traces the flow of physical parts and materials. The companies that supply the tools — CAD and CAE software, mould-flow simulation, moulding presses, standardised mould bases (sometimes grouped as the "platform" vendors) — are a horizontal layer that sells into every tier at once, OEM, Tier 1 and Tier 2 alike. They shape how the work is done everywhere, but they neither design nor supply the part itself, so they are not a rung on the ladder.

1.5.3 How the two axes overlap

The roles and the tiers do not line up one-to-one — they overlap. The diagram shows the supply chain (solid arrows, who buys from whom) together with the tier that most often performs each functional role (dashed):

The moulder role straddles Tier 1 and Tier 2 — and that is the key point: "tier" is a relative position, not a fixed rank. A moulder is a Tier 1 if it ships the finished part straight to the OEM, and a Tier 2 if it ships to another supplier who integrates it — so one company can be Tier 1 on one programme and Tier 2 on another.