TE Connectivity Has Grown in Empalme Since 1989

Overview

TE Connectivity designs and manufactures connectivity and components used across automotive, medical, transportation and industrial markets worldwide. On Tetakawi’s Bella Vista Campus in Empalme, Sonora, it runs three plants with around three thousand people, producing automotive components alongside medical and transportation products. TE joined Bella Vista, Tetakawi’s flagship Campus, in 1989. The Campus has operated since 1986 and is where the model was built.

Ricardo Gómez, TE’s director of operations, sums up the arrangement plainly: Tetakawi brings in the talent and the human resources, and TE brings the technology and the products that get built there. Nearly four decades on, that sentence still describes the arrangement.

The Challenge

An operation that intends to be somewhere for decades needs different things from one that is opening a plant. The questions are not about entry. They are about whether a partner keeps delivering, year after year, on the things that quietly decide whether a plant thrives over the long run: deep and reliable talent, room to expand the moment demand grows, and logistics and compliance that run cleanly without pulling focus off the product.

Those requirements only get harder as an operation grows. A single plant can absorb a bad week. Three plants on one Campus, shipping daily to a border crossing under a customs framework that changes, cannot. What TE needed was not flexibility at the start but consistency over time, from a partner whose own capability grew at the same rate the operation did.

A Division of Labor That Has Held Since 1989

The division of labor is what makes that possible, and it has not moved since 1989. TE keeps what is its own: its technology, its processes, its quality standards and certifications, and its production lines. Tetakawi carries everything around them. That is not a starter arrangement, built to get a plant open and then outgrown. It is a working split that has held through three plants, several product families and more than one generation of the workforce that runs them.

The Solution

On Bella Vista the arrangement covers what every operation needs, starting with room. When TE needs to expand, the next building on the Campus is already there, so expansion is not gated by a construction schedule or a new site search. Workforce is the second. Tetakawi recruits and manages the people against the profiles TE sets, recruiting across a region about 60 miles north and south of the Campus, and connecting the plant with the local colleges and technical schools that feed its pipeline of engineers and technicians.

Logistics is the third. TE ships around seven trucks a day. In Mexico, Tetakawi is the importer and exporter of record under its IMMEX program; entering the United States, TE is. Those goods move under entities certified as Authorized Economic Operators, a certification designed to reduce inspection rates and speed handling at the crossing. Compliance is the fourth. TE stays responsible for meeting Mexican law and its own internal standards, while Tetakawi handles the documentation, permits and filings with local authorities.

Why the Workforce Stays

On-site daycare, on-Campus medical services and busing between workers’ neighborhoods and the plant are part of why people stay, and the effect compounds in a way that shows up outside the plant. “When I started, most people came riding bikes,” Gómez says. “Now everybody has cars, and most of our operators have bought a house.” The same people, getting better, year after year. A three-plant operation that lasts is not built on a revolving door.

• Space to grow into: TE expands into the next building on the Campus rather than waiting on a construction schedule.
• Workforce recruited and kept: Tetakawi reaches about 60 miles north and south, and connects the plant with the technical schools that feed its pipeline.
• Border runs handled: around seven trucks a day under Tetakawi’s IMMEX program and an Authorized Economic Operator certification designed to reduce inspection rates and speed handling at the crossing.

Outcomes

TE has kept growing on the same Campus since 1989. Three plants later, the arrangement has held.

What changes over that kind of span is not the arrangement but how little of it a company has to think about. TE has spent nearly four decades putting its attention on technology, process and quality, and has grown to three plants without having to build its own facilities function, recruiting function or border operation. Three plants, one partner, and the same division of labor it started with.