Even though the plant will not start series production until 2025, there are many tasks to be completed.Continue reading
The BMW Debrecen plant (eastern Hungary) will start test production in September of next year, the HR marketing and recruitment manager of BMW Group Debrecen told Dehir in an interview. Imre Szekeres said that recruitment is ongoing at the company, and the full workforce is expected to be reached by the end of next year, as the test production is scheduled to start in September 2024.
As Világgazdaság reports, there are currently around 200 employees working in Debrecen. They are the ones who are doing the background work, making sure that construction goes at the right pace. In addition, they have another hundred students who are studying there; however, their colleagues who are directly involved in production are spending their training period in the BMW Group’s factories in Germany.
Series production is scheduled to start in 2025.
As the HR manager said, most production-related jobs involve a 12-month training period abroad, while in administrative areas such as HR, finance, legal, purchasing, and controlling, it is only a few weeks. He indicated that they constantly monitor changes in the labor and wage markets. “At the moment, it is going through a lot of changes both in the country and in the region, and there are a lot of challenges in this area,” he answered, when asked if they can offer higher wages than their competitors.
The BMW Group’s Debrecen plant will be the first iFactory based plant in the company’s history, making it the most modern plant ever,”
stated Imre Szekeres, adding that it is a highly automated production line.
Compared to other types of manufacturing operations that rely on manual labor, they put much more emphasis on mechatronics, on electronics knowledge. “We are looking for a lot of people to fill these kinds of maintenance jobs and process engineering jobs. We think that this is the factory of the future and we welcome anyone who wants to build the future in this area,” stressed the HR manager in the interview.
In Debrecen, the BMW Group is building a full-fledged car factory with press, body, paint, and assembly shops, as well as a unique battery assembly plant to enable the in-house assembly of battery cells for the electric drive. The plant, located on a site of more than 400 hectares in Debrecen’s Northwestern Economic Belt, is the first of the Group’s units to be developed entirely on the basis of the iFactory concept from the very first design phase, with the aim of efficient, environmentally friendly, and digitalized production.
The BMW Group Plant Debrecen is scheduled to start production in 2025, with more than 1,500 employees, and the first model of the all-electric New Class (Neue Klasse), debuting in Debrecen, will roll off the production line at the same time.
Via Dehir, Világgazdság, Featured image: Facebook/BMW Group
