BAE Systems Grows Its Aerospace Operation in Guaymas

Overview

BAE Systems started small in 2001, as a wire-and-harness shop at Tetakawi’s Roca Fuerte Campus in Guaymas, building aircraft engine cables, high-voltage cables and cables for hybrid electric buses. As Brian Berich puts it, the plant kept adding products, processes and complexity, and with them more people and more machines.

Today it runs across three buildings with around eight hundred people, manufacturing commercial aircraft components for BAE’s aerospace programs. The advanced aerospace operation a visitor sees now did not arrive fully formed; it was grown one product and one building at a time. Opening its first plant on the Campus, BAE needed a partner that could recruit a skilled workforce and carry the administrative work behind it, the permits, the filings and the payroll, so its own team could stay on the product.

The Challenge

A lower-cost location does not run an aerospace operation on its own. The company had to find and keep skilled people in a labor market it had never hired in, for work that takes years to teach and has to be taught again for each new product line. None of that matters if the plant cannot be staffed.

The second constraint was regulatory. In a business where a misstep on labor law, safety, tax or imports is not a small problem, and for a company that puts compliance first, learning the rules by trial and error was not an option. BAE needed the people found and the regulatory load carried, by a partner that had already done both.

Adding a Product Line in a New Country

Growth compounds the problem. Every product BAE added brought new processes, new equipment and new skills to hire for, and each one arrived while the plant was still running everything that came before it. A company standing up its own recruiting function, its own compliance department and its own facilities pipeline would have been building three businesses at once. BAE wanted to build one: the product, and the culture around it. Everything else, it wanted a partner who already knew how to do.

The Solution

BAE chose Tetakawi’s Roca Fuerte Campus in Guaymas for exactly that division of labor. The workforce, both the hourly operators and the specific skilled roles the plant needs, is recruited by Tetakawi, so a growing operation stays staffed without BAE running its own recruiting function. As BAE added products, it took additional space on the Campus as it came online, and grew from one building to three.

The administrative work sits with Tetakawi as well: safety and health programs, tax filings, and importing into Mexico, the requirements Berich says his team no longer has to carry itself. Three more are handled at the Campus level: environmental permitting, civil protection, and the environmental filings behind them, by specialists whose full-time job is keeping pace with them. Through all of it BAE kept full control of its product and set the culture on the floor.

When the Rules Changed Overnight

The moment Berich points to came during the pandemic, when the rules changed faster than any company could track them. Tetakawi tracked each change and kept the plant’s programs current as it came.

• Hiring and recruiting: Tetakawi finds both the hourly workers and the specific skilled roles BAE needs, so staffing kept pace with each new product line.
• The administrative work, handled: safety and health programs, tax filings, importing, and environmental permits carried at the Campus level.
• Room to grow: as new product lines came, BAE took space on the Campus as it came online, from one building to three.

Outcomes

What BAE built in Guaymas is a workforce that grows and stays. Operators go back to school, earn their degrees and move into the salaried roles they always wanted. People who leave for other jobs often ask to come back, and at local job fairs, Berich says, many arrive wanting to work for BAE specifically. What Berich returns to is the pride his team takes in the work.

BAE set the culture on the floor and owned the product end to end, while the recruiting, the compliance, the tax filings and the logistics of operating in Mexico sat with Tetakawi. On that division of labor, BAE grew a cable shop into an advanced aerospace operation.