US – The new park in Texas will consist of two manufacturing and warehouse buildings covering 1.2m sq.ft and will require up to 1,250 workers, including 850 in newly created positions. The park will begin supporting the Arlington Assembly plant in 2018.
“Through strong supplier and community relations, we’re able create new supplier parks to generate significant benefits to our manufacturing operations and the communities in which we operate,” said Steve Kiefer, GM senior vice-president of Global Purchasing and Supply Chain. “This new supplier park will create improved logistics efficiency and coordination, while also bringing significant employment opportunities to Arlington.”
GM currently employs around 4,225 people at Arlington to make the Chevrolet Tahoe and Suburban, GMC Yukon and Yukon XL, plus the Cadillac Escalade. The OEM says that nearly 600 of the new manufacturing and professional jobs created at the park will handle work previously performed outside the US.
One of the suppliers moving into the park is IAC, whose president and CEO, Steve Miller, said: “We are excited to establish this new Arlington location as one of our flagship manufacturing operations among IAC’s 22 other US plants.” He continued: “IAC’s role as a supplier of vehicle interiors to GM extends back almost a century and this impressive new centre marks a great beginning to our next century in partnership with this customer.”
The new development is part of GM’s ongoing strategy to establish supplier parks next to its US production sites, in an effort to reduce transportation costs, enhance communication and benefit what it calls “continuous improvement activities”. In addition to Arlington, where it has been manufacturing since 1954, the OEM has now built parks at Fairfax in Kansas, Wentzville in Missouri, Bowling Green in Kentucky and Fort Wayne in Indiana.
