CNH Zedelgem

Arrived in London after an overnight flight from  New York. I have a few hours up my sleeve to get to the train station and head to Bruges in Belgium.

Spent the morning with Luc Ollevier touring CNH Zedelgem plant where all the forege harvesters and large square balers for the world market are built. The CR and CX combines for a large proportion of the world market also come out of Zedelgem.
Luc started with New Holland in 1968 and was in charge of sales in Africa and the Middle East. He lays claim to one of the biggest orders ' on one sheet of paper' being 400 combines to Saudi Arabia.

Luc left the company in 1991 with the Ford New Holland restructure, but has returned in his retirement to conduct tours of the facility. This is he does very well and has ahuge knowledge of the Company and product.

There over 2000 staff employed, 500 of which are in development. The plant uses 145000 tonnes of steel and 125000 litres of paint each year.

The process starts with parts coming infrom selected foundries who supply many of the castings for gearboxes and drives etc. These are then machined to specifications on site.
All steel framing and panels are produced on site my amix of manual labour and some very sophisticated robot technology.

About 25 combines are produced each day and so much of the robotic equipment is able to perform various tasks, the milling machine for example has 160 tools to choose from - and has also been tought to put them away when finished !
The painting process then takes place, which is a powder baked process and provides a high quality finish.

Assembly then takes place and uses a clever system where small ' feeder' assembly line build particular areas of the machine ie cab, rotors, cleaning area, engine units etc. these are then added to the main assembly line which moves in 20 minute intervals.

The cabs are built in France by a subsidiary, and as there has been significant investment in the design, the cabs are also sold to other manufacturers for applications in beet harvesting for example.
The headers are built in the CNH plant in Poland, the same plant that builds the round balers. Though some of the components requiring precision machining are built in Zedelgem.

The plant boasts a huge visitor centre and conference facility that has equipment on display dating back to the founding of the Company through to the most up to date combines and balers.
The centre caters for 8000 visitors per year.
Thanks to Luc for the 5 hour tour and to CNH for a graet tour and a huge lunch !