The FINANCIAL — Ligny-en-Barrois/Stuttgart – On Saturday, July 9, more than 1,000 employees and their family members attended the big Family Day to celebrate the 30th production anniversary of the EvoBus plant in Ligny-en-Barrois, which is in the Lorraine region of eastern France.
From 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., the plant was transformed into a huge event venue featuring a children’s program, live music on stage, and an exhibition of historical vehicles.
The French bus plant in Ligny is an integral part of the European production network of EvoBus GmbH, which is headquartered in Kirchheim unter Teck, Germany. The 430 employees in Ligny manufacture transit buses and travel coaches of the Mercedes-Benz brand. Also, coaches of the Setra brand have been produced at Ligny till 2006. In addition to producing a total of 13,500 buses to date, the plant also assembled around 3,000 Mercedes-Benz Sprinter minibuses between 2001 and 2009.
The Ligny plant was incorporated into EvoBus GmbH in 1995 and benefits to this day from its inclusion in the world’s largest globally positioned truck and bus manufacturer. EvoBus is the European arm of the Daimler Buses business unit of Daimler AG. The extent to which production processes and procedures have changed at the plant since it was included in EvoBus is demonstrated by the development in production output. More than 20 years elapsed between the production of the first Setra in Ligny in 1981 and the day on which the 7,500th vehicle rolled off the line in 2005, but it took only six years for the plant to produce the next batch of about 6,000 units.
Wolfgang Hänle, Managing Director for Production at Daimler Buses, offered the following comments: “Our facility in Ligny is an extremely reliable member of the EvoBus production network, which encompasses six plants in Germany, the Czech Republic, Turkey, Spain, and, of course, France. We’re very proud that we have been able to raise production and process quality to the highest levels at all of the plants within this network. The Ligny plant has always performed admirably within this process. This has been possible only because we have a highly qualified and very motivated workforce here in Ligny.”
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