With suppliers contributing 60% or more of the value of today’s manufactured products, automakers consistently evaluate the most efficient way to profitably leverage their suppliers’ capabilities. Profit and operational performance hinge on robust commercial relationships — and that means both parties, automakers and suppliers, are committed to building stronger partnerships that foster collaboration, innovation, and long-lasting mutual benefits. However, the commercial leverage between the parties can at times restrict the open, unfiltered flow of information necessary to drive improvements. The Plante Moran Working Relations Index® study bridges that gap to comprehensively improve understanding between customer and supplier. View insights from the 2025 WRI® Study here.
The North American OEM-Supplier Working Relations Index®
Each spring, Plante Moran conducts its annual North American Automotive OEM-Supplier WRI® — an automotive-focused, public, syndicated study. Conducted annually since 2000, the study collects confidential information from suppliers about what they believe enables and restricts their ability to fully support new technology commercialization, product launch readiness, and warranty targets. OEMs use the resulting data to improve the timeliness, cost, and quality of every interaction between them and their suppliers.
The WRI® methodology is based on three principles:
- Anonymous responses by participants allow honest evaluation while respecting commercial and individual relationships.
- Time-tested and academically rigorous questions quantify relational factors, creating a fact-based, data-rich index. Complimenting qualitative questions provide the “why” for actionable insight.
- Consistency and relevancy enable year-to-year benchmarking as well as the adoption of new product and geographic markets over time.
Response rates are high for the automotive WRI® survey. For example, the 2025 syndicated study drew in more than 665 executives from more than 398 companies. This high response rate provides an accurate, unparalleled representation of the supply base’s perspectives of OEM purchasing organizations. The breadth of the study means that results — both good and bad — are not “one-off” or unique to a particular company or personal relationship dynamic.
Unbiased, candid supplier feedback is essential to helping OEMs and suppliers create robust relationships that endure and thrive amid industry volatility and transformation. In the 2025 Gartner® “Want to Be a Customer of Choice? Start by Asking for Supplier Feedback” report, Plante Moran’s annual satisfaction surveys were named as an example.
Benefits for suppliers
If you’re a supplier, participation provides you with an opportunity to provide input on buyers’ knowledge base, communication effectiveness, trust, responsiveness, and integrity without fear of retribution. Suppliers may also provide feedback on various policies, procedures, and costs driven by other customer business functions, such as contractual terms and conditions, payment timeliness, and warranty and other chargeback systems.
As a participant, you receive a full OEM Benchmark Results Report as a thank-you for your time providing feedback. These results allow you to judge your customer impartially based on the collective view of your competitors and supplier peers. Now you can look at your OEM experiences and ask, “Is it them?” Or, “Is it us?” The WRI® study gives insight into leveraging your current strengths and aids in creating workstreams to address internal weaknesses better to meet an OEM’s expectations or performance requirements. It also enables your firm to strategically assess existing and targeted commercial relationships.
Your contribution through the WRI® study helps your customers prioritize areas for improvement within their companies. If you receive a request to provide input, participation is strongly encouraged; your contribution will benefit you and your peers by assuring a robust data set that will be taken seriously by OEM leadership and the industry.
Benefits for OEMs
If you’re an OEM, the WRI® survey establishes the benchmark you need to determine if your supplier-related practices support — or detract from — your product development success, cost competitiveness, quality improvement, risk mitigation, and corporate sustainability.
The WRI® brings you unparalleled, unbiased input from your supply base about your firm’s perceived trustworthiness, communication effectiveness, response timeliness, integrity, and buyer performance. It also quantifies your suppliers’ response to your firm’s purchasing business practices, such as engineering engagement, payment and issue resolution effectiveness, and cost management.
OEMs use WRI® data to:
- Set annual organizational, department, or individual performance objectives.
- Track critical purchasing performance metrics.
- Establish action-oriented supplier council and workstream efforts.
With industrywide data, you can measure your competitive differential created by supply chain capabilities. This data is critical, as many industries currently grapple with supply chain constraints, market volatility, and demand fluctuations. Suppliers are gravitating toward customers that are less costly to serve, as well as those that offer larger margins, even with equal or lower prices. In short, the WRI® creates an opportunity to bolster your company’s position as your supply base’s customer of choice.
Custom WRI® studies. Is one right for you?
Plante Moran also conducts custom proprietary studies for automotive OEMs and suppliers, as well as additional industrial sectors.
The use cases for custom surveys are diverse. For example, a foreign-based vehicle manufacturer looking to expand in North America needed to know if their supply base and supplier relationships would support proposed localization and expansion. We ran a baseline WRI® survey to determine the suppliers’ perception of the OEM and where improvement was needed.
In another example, an OEM had internal tension between its purchasing group and other functions. It wanted to resolve these issues based on data and not emotion. We worked with purchasing and other functions to segment survey questions into categories of primary responsibility for purchasing, finance, engineering, manufacturing, and corporate leadership. After receiving ratings for the identified functions, the OEM was able to develop internal working groups — that included suppliers — to pinpoint the actions necessary to lessen friction between functions and the cost of doing business with that OEM.
Building a custom WRI® study is time- and cost-efficient. Setup requires an initial consultation, a confidential exchange of supplier contact information, and the creation of an online survey to fit your needs and objectives.
The custom WRI® Voice of Customer survey for suppliers
Just as it’s valuable for a customer to know the honest opinions and perceptions of its supply base, some suppliers want to understand how their customers judge them on innovation, responsiveness, quality, and cost competitiveness.
We conduct custom, proprietary surveys and interviews for suppliers from all industry sectors that go beyond typical quantitative “customer scorecards,” providing the opportunity to deeply understand the voice of purchasing, engineering, quality, and other major functions that determine sourcing decisions.
Suppliers use WRI® Voice of Customer analyses for:
- Input into long-term strategic planning.
- Allocating resources to grow strategic customers or business units.
- Market and competitive intelligence, particularly in rapidly changing markets.
Custom surveys measure an individual supplier and its leading competitors against quantitative-sourcing criteria. These results are complemented with personal interview workstreams that capture the customer’s qualitative opinions, providing a deeper level of analysis. The surveys and interviews can be conducted at various levels, including regional and global, corporate and business units, and detailed functional levels.
Voice of Customer surveys aggregate diverse inputs gathered over a short time frame. The analysis gives your company’s leadership concise, summarized feedback that would otherwise be piecemealed across hundreds of separate conversations with different stakeholders. The insights are presented in a manner that supports actionable plans for long-term results.
The bottom line
As playwright George Bernard Shaw once said, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” Don’t let that happen to your strategic commercial relationships. A WRI® survey will improve your communication flow, build trust, and maximize efficiency — and your profits.
