Slovakian Prime Minister visits Brose manufacturing facilities in Bratislava

Prime Minister Mikulás Dzurinda (2nd from left) showing great interest in the Brose door system. (from left to right of picture) Brose general plant manager Jan Francke, Milan Tichy, head of finance and administration at Brose Bratislava, and Dr. Josef Uhrik, executive board speaker of VW Slovakia.

Besides touring the facilities of the seat manufacturer Johnson Controls, the Slovakian leader, accompanied by VW’s executive board speaker, Dr Jozef Uhrik, also went round the Brose Group’s plant. From July 2002 onwards, the door systems for the VW’s and Porsche’s new SUV will be produced here.

The prime minister welcomed the fact that the entire door system assembly will be carried out in Slovakia. In addition, he praised Brose Bratislava for sourcing manufacturing components from local suppliers.

"Every 60 minutes door systems will be delivered - in synchronous production with the carmaker - to the customer’s plant 25 kilometers away. We are capable of producing up to 2,000 variants without major machine changeovers,” is how general plant manager Jan Francke described the highly flexible assembly process to the politicians. With 125 employees on the payroll, it is planned to achieve a turnover of 80 million euros in the year 2003.

Franke added that almost all employees had undergone an induction program at the production company in Meerane/Saxony. The Brose Plant in Saxony is a training center for just-in-sequence production and sets standards for the JIS plants throughout the Brose Group.

“The development of the Slowakian automotive industry since 1993 has been exemplary”, concluded Dzurinda, pledging his government’s continued support. The prime minister announced that a first step would be to push ahead with the technical developments concerning transport in the industrial park of Lozorno, lending his support to a railway sliding which is to be built by the end of the year.