When a Kenworth or Peterbilt tractor-trailer rolls down the highway, there’s an 80 percent chance that truck’s engine was built in Lowndes County.
That’s according to Mike Arzamendi, communication and training manager at PACCAR, who spoke to the Exchange Club of Columbus at its weekly luncheon Thursday about the 400-acre engine plant the company operates in the Lowndes County Industrial Park.
The plant is one of two engine plants PACCAR owns, with the other in the Netherlands. The local plant broke ground in 2007, and in less than 10 years had delivered 100,000 engines, Arzamendi said.
PACCAR’s local plant houses everything from an assembly room where robots put the engines together to a bed and breakfast where, in Arzamendi’s words, “big wigs” from the company’s corporate offices or other out-of-town visitors to the plant can stay. The assembly line is full of machines and robots that help assemble the engines — but, Arzamendi said, even with machines doing much of the heavy lifting, the plant employs roughly 600 people.
In fact, for every robot at the plant, the company needs at least one person to help maintain it.
“We need someone to maintain it, somebody to program it, somebody to go in there and fix it when it breaks, so we’re always going to be hiring people,” Arzamendi said. “It’s a misnomer that automation automatically takes the human equation out of there. I think we’ll have people around in factories for a long, long time.”
The plant is choosy about the employees it hires too, Arzamendi said. For every person hired at the plant, 17 are rejected.
Those looking for a job on the assembly line fill out an online application and assessment before coming into the plant for an in-person interview and assessment process.
The assessments are not WorkKeys, said Arzamendi, referencing a work skills assessment used by other area industries and East Mississippi Community College when looking at applicants for manufacturing positions. PACCAR’s assessment is designed by a third party testing agency and tailored to the specific needs of PACCAR’s plant. It tests everything from attention to detail and multi-tasking to teamwork and judgment.
Arzamendi showed example questions of a gauge simulation that tests whether an individual can keep track of multiple readings on a machine and production simulations that show whether the individual can follow directions. The test also checks for basic quantitative problem-solving, or, Arzamendi simplified, “Can this person add?”
Once an applicant has passed the assessment, he or she interviews with five separate people at the plant, including employees already working on the assembly line who are there to make sure the applicant is a team player.
“The introductory salary for an assembly person is $30,000 a year,” Arzamendi said in response to a question from an Exchange Club member. “If you’re in there for five years and you go through three aggressive grade levels, you could be earning $60,000. And that’s just with a high school diploma or equivalent.”
Room to grow
Arzamendi also talked about some of the things that made PACCAR choose Lowndes County for the plant’s location. He said while the state and local governments provided good incentives, he also credited the area’s low electric rates, a myriad of transportation options — Highway 82, Golden Triangle Regional Airport and the Tombigbee River — and the relatively short distance to some of PACCAR’s plants where other truck parts are built.
He also sang the praises of a workforce that is ready to be hired.
“You have a trainable workforce here,” he said. “About two months ago, I put out word that we were hiring on four different radio stations. That was on Tuesday. By Thursday noon, I had 350 applicants. We have a lot of folks that still think it’s a good place to work.”
Arzamendi added that PACCAR plans to expand some in the next couple of years, though he didn’t provide details of any planned expansion. Still, he said, there is room to grow.
He said the plant just hosted a meeting of PACCAR’s board of directors, held at a different location once every four years.
“Those are the folks who sign the big money, the million-dollar deals,” he said. “And that’s why over the next 2-1/2 years, you’re going to see us do some pretty cool things here.”
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