Automotive wiring producer SEWS (Sumitomo Electric Wiring System) has created 1,271 jobs in the city of Orastie, accounting for almost 50% of the unemployed in the city, following the opening of a production facility.
The factory opened in Orastie last week is SEWS' second facility in Romania after Deva, where low labour costs prompted Sumitomo to establish one of its biggest operations worldwide.
The Orastie-based facility is the fifth-largest in Europe, after Poland and Slovakia. Though Sumitomo has tens of such factories throughout the world, it chose to establish some of Europe's largest in Romania.
SEWS, a subsidiary of Sumitomo Corporation, has announced it will open a third facility in Romania in December which will make wiring for Toyota.
"We work with a smile on our faces." This is the motto of the Japanese company, which Romanian workers have also been required to adopt. The company mascot consists of a bald man with a broom in his hand, which represents SEWS' European head, Hiroshi Oba. The Japanese company adopted a specific tactic to motivate employees and test their skills. Workers' voices should be heard inside the factory at all times as is the case, for example, when they finish an operation and they shout "Well done!"
Of the 1,271 employees of the new factory, 1,007 represent the direct work force; 258 workers are part of the manufacturing process. A production planner announces what kind of wiring is to be manufactured several weeks in advance so that the necessary raw materials can be ordered.
This person knows exactly which supplies are in stock at all times and uses a supply storage system based on the "first in, first out" principle. A five-colour coding system is used for this purpose, in which each month is assigned a colour and those supplies that have been in storage the longest are always used first. The facility in Orastie goes through 3.1 million metres of cable every week, that is 160,000 km of cable each year, which is about enough to connect Orastie and Japan five times.
The plant's warehouse takes up 840 sqm and is organised on a nine-level structure, with 1,981 locations, where the over 1,200 raw material components used in the manufacturing process are stored.
Production planning for Orastie began in 2002 and the Deva-based SEWS unit trained the first 300 operators so as to keep to a minimum the time the facility in Orastie would need for training. During this time, the production facility was built.
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