WABCO Holdings Inc., a global supplier of technologies that the company says improve the safety, efficiency and connectivity of commercial vehicles, recently announced the grand opening of its new manufacturing facility in North Charleston, South Carolina.

The company moved from its existing plant in Charleston, which was built in the late 1990s in conjunction with WABCO’s partnership with Cummins.

Jon Morrison, WABCO President, Americas, commented on when the first plant was built:

“We were in sort of a multi-tenant industrial economic development zone, and we’ve grown now to the point where we needed a larger facility," he said. "This new facility will increase our available workspace for further growth.”

This new facility demonstrates that WABCO is committed to ensuring that they remain close to their customer’s operations, Morrison added. Manufacturing products locally allows them to be more responsive and keep their costs lower. The larger facility will also allow WABCO to expand to manufacturing more products locally, meaning that customers would no longer have to import these products.

“We’re very focused on the overall total cost of ownership for fleets, and having local manufacturing, we can actually have fleets come and visit the plant and look at the process, and really engage with them relative to their own maintenance practices and how we can improve the service line for the brakes going forward," Morrison said. "So it really gives us a good platform to have a hands-on dialogue with fleets in terms of their overall maintenance requirements for these products."

The new plant anticipates considerable expansion over the next couple of years. They currently have the capacity to install up to 200,000 air disc brakes for trucks and trailers. They produce both brakes on the same process, and hope to get enough growth to challenge that capacity within the next few years. Additionally, they plan to manufacture new products at this facility as the plant continues to expand.