Renault Finalizes Capacity Hike at Moscow Plant

PARIS – Renault boosts line speed 10% at its Avtoframos joint-venture plant in Moscow, raising hourly output from 30 to 33 cars.

It also launched a new shift schedule earlier this week that will help increase annual production capacity by an even greater percentage.

“We installed some additional robots, some machines and made some minor changes in regards to the layout of the final assembly line and the body shop,” Bruno Ancelin, Renault senior vice president-Eurasia Region and managing director-Russia, tells WardsAuto at the auto show here.

The Avtoframos factory now has body-shop capacity of 31 units per hour for cars based on the Logan platform, including the Logan sedan, Sandero and Sandero Stepway hatchbacks and Duster entry-level cross/utility vehicle. It also has added capacity for C-segment cars such as the Fluence sedan currently assembled in Moscow.

“Unfortunately, today we cannot use this full capacity, because we are limited by the final assembly line, which is 33 units per hour,” Ancelin says. “So fine-tuning has to be done between the C-segment and the Logan platform.”

The second step toward higher capacity is the introduction of a new working system earlier this week.

In the past Avtoframos has run on three, 7.5-hour shifts five days a week. Shifts sometimes were added on Saturday mornings or Sunday nights. “Starting this week, we operate in two 11-hour shifts per day, six days a week,” Ancelin says.

It is a rotation system with three groups of workers. Each employee works four days a week. Altogether the plant is running from 8 p.m. Sunday to 8 p.m. Saturday.

“This is a system we copied from Nissan’s plant located in Aguascalientes, (Mexico), which is one of the most efficient Nissan plants worldwide,” Ancelin says.

The Moscow facility has operated 5,200 hours a year in the past, but now will run 5,800 hours annually.

“Avtoframos is the first plant in the Renault world to use this kind of working system,” Ancelin notes. “So, considering the capacity increase of 10% from 30 to 33 cars per hour and the increase of the number of hours due to the new working system, we will increase Avtoframos’ capacity between 17% and 18%, compared to the situation in June.

“I think that’s the maximum of what we can do now.”

Following the changes, Avtoframos can build 185,000 cars a year from complete-knocked-down kits. The plant also assembles cars from semi-knocked-down kits in a separate workshop, but the SKD builds are not included in this figure.

Avtoframos assembled 102,176 cars through August, including 40,824 Logans, 31,690 Sanderos and Sandero Stepways and 25,817 Dusters.

Renault launched Russian sales of the locally made Duster in early March. The CUV currently is the highest-volume model assembled by the French auto maker in Moscow.