Benefits for cast product development through early supplier involvement

In the foundry industry one trend is to move from demands of lowest price to a more collaborative approach when choosing the supplier. Early supplier involvement (ESI) enables a collaborative approach. The aim of the paper is to find success factors for staying competitive in the global market by ESI and to discover the benefits and challenges in implementing ESI in the foundry industry. Moreover, we present solutions proposed by the foundry industry professionals for the found challenges. We conducted four case studies in foundries and their customers. The case studies showed that ESI has improved the development processes. Long-term commitment enables trust, which is the most important factor when implementing ESI. Our research supports previous results about the benefits of ESI, and we claim that ESI is beneficial especially for the foundry industry due to their production process type.