Huf Polska: Leading experts for production and painting of car door handles

In line with the rapid expansion of automotive production in Eastern Europe in the 90’s and the need to open up new competitive manufacturing resources, the owners of the automotive supplier Huf decided also to go East. The choice fell on Poland, where major OEMs like Volkswagen, Opel and – since long – Fiat were situated.

At first, Huf rented a building in Katowice. In this region, industries like mining, paper, textile, engineering and automotive were already present. Huf started in Katowice with the assembly of switching modules for Mercedes. Soon, further projects followed, including brackets for the Mercedes W210, tailgate latches and glove compartment latches.

In 2001, the Huf Polska team established a production with six assembly lines for BMW 3 series door brackets. By then, the number of employees of the automotive supplier had risen to 26 and production space became too tight. To allow the rise from a supportive extended work-bench to a fully integrated production, the decision fell to build a new plant in the new special economic zone of Tychy, 20 kilometers from Katowice. Here, the local government offered ample opportunity for investors to expand their business. Moreover, Tychy already was the core of an automotive industry cluster, as Fiat had opened a new plant to produce the legendary Polski Fiat (Fiat 126p) here in 1975.

Automotive supplier Huf Polska with rapid expansion in Tychy

“Tychy is an attractive town with a long industrial tradition, and we can rely on a good infrastructure as well as a pool of qualified employees. This is one of the reasons why Huf Polska was able to grow quickly since we moved to the new premises in Tychy in March 2003,” explains Krystian Irasiak, Human Resources Manager at Huf Polska. “Moreover, we had a highly motivated workforce right from the start who worked quite a few miracles,” he adds.

One of these memorable events was the move of the automotive supplier from Katowice to Tychy within two days only. In preparation of the move, the team had set-up brand new plastic injection molding machines. “This was a great step for us,” reports Tomasz Skrzyński, who joined Huf Polska in 2001 as an quality controller and set-up the new quality standards together with colleagues from Velbert. Today, he is head of Quality Engineering at the automotive supplier Huf Polska.

“We were the first company to introduce the new gas injection molding technology (GID) in this region. Therefore, the recruitment of qualified employees was a challenge. Yet we selected and trained the right set of highly committed people and ramped-up production in line with the high-quality standards of Huf Group,” Tomasz Skrzyński says.

With the introduction of injection molding, Huf Polska transformed from an extended workbench to a “full-grown” member of the Huf production network, delivering parts directly to customers. Among the first directly shipped products were door handles and brackets for the Ford C1 platform (comprising Ford Focus and C-Max models). Soon, orders for BMW E46 (3series), the Opel Gamma platform (Corsa, Meriva, Tigra) as well as the Kia ED platform (the first generation of Kia C’eed) followed. What started with one line and five operators now has turned into an injection molding center with 40 machines and three-digit number of employees.

Huf Polska offers outstanding painting competence - especially for door handles

To round off the production capacity of Huf Polska at Tychy, in 2005 the automotive supplier installed the first manual paint shop. With rising demand for high quality painting of door handles, antenna housings and other parts where perfect “A-surfaces” are required, Tychy was equipped with a first automatic paint shop in 2008 and an additional one in 2016.

Continuous improvement at Huf Polska in line with lean management principles

“22 years after our foundation, we cover the full value stream of production – from injection molding via painting to final assembly. In addition, we constantly advanced our expertise in tool maintenance and modification. Step by step, we are expanding our competencies in order to consolidate our position as one of the strongholds in the Huf manufacturing network,” resumes Mariusz Prokop.

“Of course, there is room for continuous improvement. This is why every employee at Huf Polska knows about and follows the lean principles. However, we have high level support: One of our ‘assets’ is our cherished colleague Lukasz Paluch, who is Vice President Operations Strategy, Performance and Digitalization. Together with his team, he is globally in charge of these functions. With him, we have an excellent sparring partner on-site to identify and implement improvement measures in production fast and train our employees. The levelled and balanced production for example helped us to cope with the challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic as we could overcome the high volatility in the ramp-up phase after the lock-down,” Mariusz Prokop adds.