HUBER+SUHNER: Growing in Mexico Since 2011

Overview

HUBER+SUHNER is a Swiss manufacturer serving the transportation, communication and industrial segments. At its operation in Empalme, Sonora, it produces fiber optic assemblies used on cellular communication towers, primarily for signal carriers in the United States. When the company decided to expand into Mexico to serve that market from a cost-competitive base, it was starting from nothing: one employee, no building, no workforce, no permits.

On Tetakawi’s Bella Vista Campus in Empalme, that standing start became a shipping plant within a month. Fiber optics is a cyclical business, and the Campus has let the plant staff to demand in both directions rather than carry its own peak year-round. HUBER+SUHNER has operated and grown there since 2011, and the plant has been through more than one full turn of that cycle.

The Challenge

HUBER+SUHNER wanted a cost-competitive operation to serve the U.S. market, but location mattered as much as cost. The company deliberately looked away from the border. Border labor markets, in the company’s experience, are crowded and turnover runs high, and a plant that has to rehire and retrain continuously never builds the depth that precision assembly work requires. HUBER+SUHNER wanted people who would stay, grow with the company, and build a real sense of belonging.

The second problem was scale, in both directions. Demand in fiber optics arrives in waves, and a plant that can only staff for its average loses the peaks, while one that staffs for the peak carries that headcount through every trough. HUBER+SUHNER needed an operation that could staff up for a peak quickly and staff back to demand when it passed.

Starting With One Employee and Nothing Else

Before any of that could matter, the company had to build an entire operation from zero in a country it had never operated in. Finding people, setting up utilities, securing every license and permit, getting production running: all of it had to happen before a single product could ship. In 2011 HUBER+SUHNER had one employee in Mexico. Everything else was still a plan. Standing up a plant is not the same work as running one, and the company wanted to spend its first year making product rather than learning the first job.

The Solution

HUBER+SUHNER chose Tetakawi’s Bella Vista Campus in Empalme, well away from the border, in a labor market where people tend to stay. The company got a running start there: the people found, the utilities set up, and every license and permit secured before production began, drawing on infrastructure and approvals already in place from decades of operating in the region.

Water, sewage, electricity and telecommunications are the items that take longest when a company builds from nothing, and on the Campus they were already there. With Tetakawi carrying the administrative and operational load, including payroll, tax filings and the regulatory work behind them, the HUBER+SUHNER team concentrated on production and quality from the first week.

Take What You Need, Add When You Grow

The shape of the commitment was different too. HUBER+SUHNER did not have to commit to a building it would have to fill, or to headcount it would have to carry through the next trough. It took the space and the people the business needed at the time, with the ability to add more, which is what made it possible to answer a demand surge without a capital decision behind every hire.

• A strategic location: the company chose Empalme, away from the border, for a labor market where people stay and grow with it.
• A running start: water, power and telecommunications already in place, and first product shipped within a month.
• Back office carried: payroll, tax filings and the regulatory work run by Tetakawi, so the HUBER+SUHNER team concentrates on production and quality.

Outcomes

HUBER+SUHNER shipped its first products within a month of opening, with twelve operators on the floor. When the demand surge came it grew from 100 to nearly 960 people across four shifts in seven months, every position hired and trained, and when the cycle turned, it brought headcount back to demand.

The culture and the engineering talent were HUBER+SUHNER’s own, and they are what turned Empalme into a plant that Carlos Rivera, the plant manager, says now stands at the level of the company’s sister sites in Europe and Asia. Tetakawi carried the stand-up and the scaling underneath it.