Daikin officially opens US plant
25th May 2017
USA: Politicians and a crowd of more than 400 staff, customers and suppliers attended yesterday’s opening of Daikin’s US factory – the fifth-largest manufacturing facility in the world.
The new $450m facility, known as the Daikin Texas Technology Park (DTTP), is the largest production facility in the Daikin Group. It will manufacture all of the air conditioning products sold in the United States, including both residential and commercial-use products and heating equipment. It integrates the four factories that its Goodman subsidiary currently operates in the United States.
Opening the new facility, Daikin chairman Noriyuki Inoue said: “We hope to achieve a digital factory that utilises IoT and M2M and mobilises here all of the manufacturing know-how that the Daikin Group has cultivated worldwide.”
Covering an area of approximately 373,000m², it sits on 2km² of land. The third largest factory in the US, it is also the fifth largest in the world. It is currently beaten only by the Boeing aircraft plant in Washington (398,000m²), the Tesla Motors factory in California (510,000m²), Hyundai car plant in South Korea (5,050,000m²) and the VW Wolfsburg facility in Germany (6,500,000).
Daikin’s US plant is also the largest factory ever to use tilt-wall construction techniques.
In all, the building incorporates a 167,000m² distribution centre, 158,000m² of manufacturing space (plus over 18,000m² of mezzanine), 21,500m² of lab space and 18,800m² of offices. It also has parking for 5,000 vehicles and is expected to create 4,600 new jobs and a further 11,000+ indirect jobs.
The new factory, which started production earlier this year, has a modular production line that responds to fluctuations in production and automatically controls production progress by taking advantage of IoT technology. It will also serve as a model factory for Daikin in adopting the latest technology such as IoT and AI. The production technology being introduced in the United States is expected to be adopted at each Daikin production base worldwide.
News coverage by Fox 26 Houston:
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