Now its scope will be increased substantially as this new facility is now scheduled to become a chassis and rear axle manufacturing plant in 2014, and a vehicles assembly plant in 2016. This will involve the transfer of heavy and medium truck production over a period of time from the old plant located in the Hino suburb of Tokyo, which dates back to 1942, to the new facility at Koga.
The Koga plant is located on a 660 000m2 site which will see the number of employees rise from the current 60 to 2 000 by 2016.
The completion of the transfer of production from the Hino site in Tokyo to Koga and the reorganisation of Hino production processes in Japan is expected to be completed by no later than 2020. The investment in the new plant will then total R6.4-billion.
New production technologies will be introduced at the Koga plant, which will become the new Hino "mother plant" in Japan and these technologies and processes will then be rolled out at overseas assembly plants.
There are also plans to introduce facilities to enable the Koga plant to customise trucks as it aspires to meet the requirements of specific customers so as to further shorten lead times in delivering units to customers.
Besides developing innovative new production technologies at the Koga plant there are projects to make the facility "locally friendly", "environmentally friendly" and "labour friendly. This includes a number of green initiatives such as reducing CO2 emissions and the like, as well has adopting flexible production lines which will make it easy for women and senior citizens to be part of the workforce.
Hino is driven by customer demand for quality products and services that are delivered in a timely manner so that the Hino brand is established globally as the "manufacturer of choice" and thereby contributes to ongoing global growth in sales volume.
Therefore, based on Hino's strengths in QDR (quality, durability and reliability), the company will develop and provide fuel-efficient trucks and buses which have low running costs and will also strengthen the total support to its customers.
