General Motors South Africa's Struandale plant in the Eastern Cape, which currently assembles Opel products, is undergoing extensive expansions to gear up for production of the Hummer H3 later this year.

Struandale plant manager Peter Frost says that since the commissioning of the plant in 1996, the facility has almost doubled in size to cover 75 625 square metres.

In 2003 the company consolidated its paint shops at its two production sites into one facility at Struandale. This enabled the company to include robotic spray painting and implement a sophisticated transport system between the Struandale and Kempston Road plants.

"We currently run production over two shifts in the body shop, three shifts in the paint shop and operate normal single day shifts for general assembly," he emphasises. "However, as Hummer production increases, the plant will migrate to a two-shift shift operation in our General Assembly areas."

Since GM's return in 2004, a number of key initiatives have been implemented to further improve the quality of the company's products.

"We are doing a lot of things differently and attention to quality has heightened considerably."

Frost says that GM's Global Manufacturing System (GMS) has been implemented at both the company's Kempston Road and Struandale plants.

"GMS is a proven common production system in place in all GM plants around the world. GM South Africa's plants processes are therefore identical to those used at any other location. Through GMS we are leveraging common global processes to deliver world-class products to our customers."

In order to ensure that all employees understand GMS, a simulated work environment was built at the company's learning and development centre in Kempston Road.

Every single employee in the company spends a day working on a mini-production line in order to ensure that they understand GMS principles. Since January 2005 over 2000 employees have undergone training.

Isuzu light commercial vehicles and trucks are currently assembled at the company's Kempston Road plant while Opel Corsa passenger vehicles and utilities are assembled at Struandale.

By September this year the total number of employees at GM South Africa would have increased from 3600 to 4100.