| To complement existing production of 2.0 litre and 2.2 litre HDi engines, PSA Peugeot Citroën has opened a new production facility at its Trémery manufacturing plant in eastern France to further boost its manufacturing capability for second generation HDi diesel engines.
The 42,000 square metre facility represents an investment of approximately €323 million ($388 mn) and will enable the Trémery site to double its production capacity for the second generation HDi diesels developed with Ford. Production has started at 150 engines a day and is expected to rise to 800 units a day in December and, ultimately, 2,450 in three shifts. An additional 6,000 square metre unit will receive and store parts bought in from suppliers.
There are three manufacturing ‘modules’ for producing second generation HDi engines:
* Module 1, based at the Française de Mécanique at Douvrin, near Lille , produces the 1.4 litre 8 v HDi engine.
* Module 2, established at Trémery in May 2003, produces the 1.6 litre 16 v HDi engine.
* Module 3, the new Trémery production facility, will produce the 1.4 litre 8 v and 16 v HDi engines and the 1.6 litre 16 v HDi engine.
The layout of each module is the same: to one side there are the lines for final matching of cylinder heads, blocks, con rods and crankshafts. On the other side, there is engine assembly and in the middle are the maintenance shops, technical offices and quality control departments. Each module has an optimum capacity of 2,450 engines a day.
The Group’s policy of manufacturing modules revolves around designing a homogeneous production unit and then duplicating it once or several times. The principle allows a gain on investment, a reduction of time in industrialisation and also in putting resources to work. A change in one module is reproduced in another to result in a simultaneous as well as continuous process on improvement.
Trémery, one of the world’s largest diesel engine production plants, produces 8 different diesel engines and 3 different petrol engines for the Group and its cooperation partners.
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