Stellantis has announced a significant realignment of its leadership, merging logistics and production. This move aims to break down silos, enabling faster decision-making and building a more cohesive response to ongoing supply chain challenges, with the goal of increasing flexibility across global operations.
Multinational OEM Stellantis has announced major and immediately effective managerial restructuring to “drive simplification” and “enhance organisational performance” under CEO, Carlos Tavares’ leadership, clearly citing the “turbulent global environment” as the main driver for the decision.
The executive-level restructuring has drawn instant attention as a clear indication of the rising mercury levels of the situation at hand. With key global automotive logistics challenges ranging from supply chain disruptions, geopolitical volatilities, port congestion, trade wars, material shortages (like those impacting semiconductors), to battery logistics complexities and a mandatory push for sustainable practices, there is a clear and increasing focus on remapping the relationship between automotive logistics and production throughout several OEMs.
Now, with Stellantis CEO and founder, Taveras, set to retire in 2026, the carmaker’s newly announced reorganisation looks to bring the logistics, supply chain and production functions closer together in a bid to increase flexibility and resilience in the face of such a shifting and unpredictable vehicle logistics environment.
To boot, the fact that this organisational reshuffle is in force “with immediate effect,” points to the acute nature of the challenges.
The executive realignment is as follows:
Announcement:
Stellantis’ key management changes cohering logistics and production
As part of this significant executive overhaul, Stellantis has announced it is appointing Antonio Filosa as Chief Operating Officer of North America, in addition to his role as CEO of the Jeep brand. Filosa succeeds Carlos Zarlenga, whose future role within the company remains undisclosed. Having spearheaded the growth of Stellantis’ South America region, Filosa, says Stellantis, brings a wealth of experience to his new position.
Meanwhile, Jean-Philippe Imparato has been named Chief Operating Officer of Enlarged Europe, alongside his role as CEO of Pro One. Imparato replaces Uwe Hochgeschurtz, who is departing the company. With over three decades of experience within Stellantis, Imparato is well-positioned to bolster the region’s commercial performance during the critical transition to electric vehicles, according to Stellantis.
Doug Ostermann has been appointed Chief Financial Officer, succeeding Natalie Knight. Stellantis emphasises Ostermann brings nearly two decades of financial expertise to the role, having held senior positions at both Stellantis and another automotive OEM. His previous role as Chief Operating Officer of Stellantis China highlights his close understanding of the industry.
Gregoire Olivier, who has been instrumental in Stellantis’ Chinese operations, has been named Chief Operating Officer of China. Olivier will also continue to serve as the company’s liaison officer to Leapmotor.
Finally, Stellantis has announced Santo Ficili as CEO of both Maserati and Alfa Romeo, joining the Top Executive Team. Ficili’s extensive experience in the automotive sector and commercial operations is expected to benefit both brands. Davide Grasso’s future role within the company has yet to be announced.
Fundamental fine-tuning as Stellantis transfers supply chain over to manufacturing
Stellantis has further expressed, “to drive commercial performance, the Supply Chain organisation will transfer to the Manufacturing Division, under the leadership of Arnaud Deboeuf, from the Purchasing Division led by Maxime Picat who will dedicate even greater focus and expertise to the performance improvements to be achieved with our supplier partners.”
What this will entail is yet to materialise, but in all likelihood, the shift will see Picat and the purchasing division being more focused on suppliers (including performance management and cost) and less on things like supplier capacity, planning and logistics.
The merging of supply chain and production could be an indication of wider synergies, and may even be an indication of supply chain and logistics having more input into the OEMs manufacturing plans and processes.
Duboeuf, speaking at Smart Factory Booster Day back in September, expressed, “what we [at Stellantis] are sharing today is that we are doing step-by-step improvements, super-pragmatic, based on the problems we at Stellantis have.
”Our [plant managers] are raising problems, and our partners are bringing solutions. We implement them quickly and with a global view.”
In other words, indications of this ever-closer coalescence between Stellantis’ departments, even on a global scale, have been underway for a while, albeit in smaller increments, and at first confining itself to smaller departments and processes; now showing itself to expand on a global scale. At the roundtable discussion, Duboeuf, speaking about Stellantis’ Dare Forward 2030 strategic plan, said, “we have a big ambition for manufacturing to reduce our transformation costs globally by 40%, which includes an objective to reduce manufacturing costs by 30%, as well as to achieve carbon neutrality by 2038.”
Then in an interview with AL on supply chain management back in February of this year, Picat said, “what we’ve got at Stellantis today is an excellent collaboration between engineering and purchasing, where we’ve got a cross functional group with the two teams working and asking themselves the question of what the relevant supply in the future is, and they consider supplier-based and technical solutions to ensure competition and resilience.”
In the past, Stellantis (and its predecessor FCA) had already reshuffled the functions of supply chain, in an effort to build this resilience, shifting top supply chain executive roles to purchasing, before moving it to production; and there are many indications that these roles and departments will continue to merge under this new umbrella, as Stellantis increasingly sees it as a strong solution to solving the as yet uncontrolled challenges that automotive companies are facing throughout the world
No comments yet