Abstract: The TPL (ThirdPart Logistics) enterprises play an important role in the automobile globalsupply chain. With the automobile manufacture global development, the partssupply chain is growing more and more complex. And the present manual logisticoperation mode with many problems cannot support the growth very well. The high-tech logistic mode which isexperimentally applied in some enterprises is proposed as one of thesolutions of these problems. Taking the automatic high-bay warehouse as anexample, advantages and disadvantagescompared to the manual operation mode are analyzed in the paper.

Ⅰ. The role of the TPL in the automobile manufacture supply chain

To discuss which operation mode is better for the TPL development,the role that the TPL enterprises play in the automobile manufacture supplychain must be clear firstly.

1. Characteristicsof the modern automobile manufacture supply chain 

The global developing mode (global market, global manufacture andglobal purchase) of present automobile industry brings about the unheard-oflevels complex supply chain.  In theactual supply chain, the complexity mainly focuses on the following aspects.

A． The demand of automobile partswhich depends on the production plan of assembly plant changes dynamically. Thevehicle assembly plant increases new designs (including adjust configuration ofthe existed vehicles) from time to time. And the production plan in short runis also adjusted steadily. The automobile parts manufacturers cannot productstrictly following the order steadily. Actually, they product the parts batchby batch according to the long term plan of the assembly plant and deliver theparts to the assembly line just in time according to the actual productionschedule. It results in two basic problems. The first one is the massive stockin the parts manufacture plants. Another problem is how to assure thousands ofparts to be delivered to the right station of the assembly line from hundredsof parts manufactures. The premise for any solutions to the problems is to keeplow cost.

B.  Global purchase means avehicle assembly company has many parts suppliers, while a supplier offers manykinds of parts to one or more assembly companies. How to decrease the logisticcost with high assurance of production quality is one of the most importantconcerns of automobile manufacture enterprises.