Budapest

Daimler advertised the CLA with lots of skin at the US Super Bowl. The car is produced in Hungary. Daimler built one of the group’s largest plants on a vast estate in the Puszta plains.

“Take a look over the fence, we’ve got some extra space,” says Plant Manager Frank Klein, pointing to the horizon. It is impossible to make out where the snow-covered company premises at Kecskemét end and where the white sky begins: Daimler owns more than 1,000 acres, roughly the size of 1,000 soccer fields, making it the group’s largest site worldwide. While only 60 acres of the total area have been developed so far, the sheer size of the site suggests that Daimler has come to Hungary to grow.

This place in the midst of the Puszta is where the heart of the Hungarian automobile industry will soon start to beat – that’s the plan. Daimler has invested more than a billion euro in this project. After a six-month search that led the Stuttgart-based company to 50 locations, including Romania, Poland, and Germany, it chose the city in southern Hungary back in 2008.

Production started in March 2012. Since then, a new car has been rolling off the line every two minutes – 350 per working day, 100,000 per year. Up to now, the B-Class has been produced here in cooperation with Daimler’s plant at Rastatt (Germany). A few days ago, the starting pistol was fired for a model produced exclusively in Hungary: The CLA – Daimler’s big hope in the compact segment for the auto year 2013. Prime Minister Viktor Orban and CEO Dieter Zetsche attended the production launch. The car was advertised to hundreds of millions of people during the US Super Bowl.

“It would have been difficult for us to expand capacities at this scale at Rastatt. Here, we were able to plan from scratch and structure things perfectly,” says Frank Klein. One of the group’s most modern plants was hence built on a greenfield site. Kecskemét, among others, is home to Daimler’s only pressing plant outside Germany. The site’s workforce is meanwhile at 3,000, which is all the more significant in a region without an industrial heritage.

What do you have to do to attract qualified workers to the Puszta? “Nothing. Most workers come from the region. We train people right here,” says Klein. The company started a mammoth task three years before opening the plant: enabling thousands of Hungarian workers to meet the standards of the premium carmaker.

Daimler rented a 30,000 square foot training centre ten kilometres away from the plant and invested 2.2 million euro in its equipment. The first workers at the new plant, which Klein calls the “backbone of production,” were trained here. After learning the basics, they underwent four-week training provided by their German colleagues at the Rastatt plant. “We cannot afford to make mistakes. Every car we produce at Kecskemét has to meet the same quality standards as a Mercedes from Rastatt – from day one,” says plant manager Klein. 300 colleagues from Germany have the job of implementing German expertise in Hungary as expats.

German-style training programmes in Hungary

Besides further education, the training centre has another, even more important mission: it is meant to become a cradle for German-style vocational training. In September 2011, the Hungarian government amended the country’s vocational training law. As a result, Daimler was for the first time able to select, hire and pay its own trainees at Kecskemét. “That was indeed an historic step,” says Klein. Just as the dual training system became the German economy’s success model, his goal is to make dual on-the-job training the standard in Hungary, too. To achieve this goal, more companies would have to go along – but currently there still is much resistance.

Daimler itself has already made wide-ranging changes to its training system: five German-style job-training programmes were approved within one year and Daimler now implements four of these. Hundreds of filing folders containing the rules for German training programmes were translated into Hungarian for this purpose. Eight instructors – four Germans and four Hungarians – are in charge of the Hungarian trainees.

64 trainees are currently learning their profession at the plant’s workbenches and machines. Next year, their number will exceed 100 for the first time. Response, however, is still somewhat restrained: while in Hungary there are four applicants per trainee position, the number in Germany is 18. “In Hungary, dual vocational training programmes do not yet have the same reputation as in Germany,” says Klein. Daimler wants to change this by initiating campaigns at schools and an own Girls’ Day. The target group is very young compared to Germany: in Hungary compulsory school attendance ends after 8 school years, most applicants are 14 years old.

The Hungarian government supports these efforts, contributing an annual 440,000 forints per trainee. This basic amount is multiplied with a factor assigned to the job career in question. Daimler for instance receives up to 883,000 forints per year for a toolmaker.

“We are proud”

Daimler also plans to break new ground in university education. 11 students are enrolled in a dual degree course at the local GAMF University of Applied Sciences in Kecskemét. There were 212 applicants. Students in the dual university program that Daimler first introduced in Hungary last year are not obliged to stay with the company once they graduate. “Should one of our students not wish to work for Daimler after graduating, we would have done something wrong,” says Klein.

The perspective in production looks better: the CLA is one of the products that carries the hopes of the Daimler group. “We are proud to build such a top-quality and indeed fascinating car,” says Klein. If the trial run is successful, further models are likely to follow suit. There is certainly enough extra space available to expand production.