Upon large machines, business grow, and expansion at global level, especially with the establishment of a factory in India and the acquisition of Electric Machinery plant in the USA, WEG decided to restructure its existing large motor factory of São Bernardo do Campo, in the metropolitan area of São Paulo and turn it into a service center for maintenance, repair, and retrofitting of large electric motors and generators.
The Factory is established on an area of 24,697 square meters and the facility counts of all machinery and equipment previously used for the manufacture of new products.
As stated by Francisco Freire, a Service Manager, “the new service shop is primarily intended to serve a growing and demanding market with quick and prompt support. The facility basically keeps the whole structure of the previous factory with newly acquired equipment, engineering team dedicated to the redesign of electric machines and workshop staff with large background and experience in rotating electric machines. The new service center offers a major competitive advantage since it allows WEG to provide quick response on the service performance, mainly due to the fact that the technology used in the performance of services is the same as the manufacture of new equipment, which guarantees an excellent performance of the repaired machine".
Strategic location and the ease access of the facility are also key factors highlighted by Francisco, "the service center is located near a large industrial center, where we can find most components required for the service performance easily and quickly. It is also located in the central region of the country, near the international airport and large highways".
Additionally, Claus Weissenstein, the Service Supervisor, stresses that WEG intends to meet the growing demand required by different industries. He explains, “Current investments on new factories are quite low and existing plants need to operate longer without downtime caused by eventual failures. Even with well-planned preventive maintenance plans, failures can happen. That´s why WEG has created such service structure to ensure quick support to customers both for preventive maintenance and for cases of machine shutdown".
Claus Weissenstein also highlights another competitive advantage of the workshop, "We want to provide support to those cases where the service work cannot be done at the customer's plant. These are cases of larger machines, usually above 1000 kW, or machines that require recertification such as Ex motors".
The service scope for this new workshop covers maintenance, repair, and retrofitting of large electric machines, from WEG and other brands, such as DC motors, three-phase induction motors (low, medium or high voltage squirrel cage or slip ring motors), synchronous motors (low, medium or high voltage brush or brushless motors), synchronous compensators, turbo generators, hydro generators, wind turbines and others.
