DEENCZ
26.03.2019 | 

KWD Portugal in Palmela creates 100 new jobs

KWD Portugal was able to double its production. The factory in Palmela now annually produces subassemblies for 500,000 vehicles manufactured in the Volkswagen Autoeuropa, Volkswagen Osnabrück, Seat Autoeuropa, Ford Valencia, and Mercedes Vitoria plants. This is the result of an investment of € 13 million in the course of the past 18 months. KWD Portugal acquired 58 robots for welding and gripping parts and hired 100 new employees. Currently, the factory in Palmela has 240 employees. It is one of six plants of the KWD Group ...

...that produce automotive components worldwide. This means that KWD generates the total production of the Schnellecke Group, one of the world’s leading logistics and production companies for the automotive industry.

Thanks to 58 new robots for handling and welding tasks, the investment of the past year and a half helped to boost the automation of the manufacturing process. The qualifications of the employees had to be adapted accordingly and new strategies developed and implemented for the organization of production. This way, KWD Portugal had succeeded in making its manufacturing process more efficient and in reaching higher quality results.

The 100 newly created jobs have been distributed among the following operative areas: manufacture – production line supply, maintenance – robot programming and maintenance, quality – measurement and validation of part parameters according to customer requirements. KWD Palmela currently supplies assemblies for the following vehicle models: Volkswagen T-Roc, Volkswagen Sharan and Seat Alhambra, Mercedes-Benz Vito and Viano, Ford Transit Connect, and for the new Volkswagen T-Roc Breeze, which will be on the market in the near future.

KWD Palmela is headed by Roberto Lanaspa and Humberto Dores. They set the goal for the KWD Group to become “the most successful division of the Schnellecke Group and to double the turnover of € 400 million in 2017 to € 800 million in 2025,” Humberto Dores remembers. Roberto Lanaspa stresses their investment in production in Pamela and confirms the Group’s vision “that it is important to take advantage of the potential of technical progress.” In this respect, Palmela is fully in line with the other four plants in Spain, Poland, the Czech Republic, China and the two plants in Germany