AGCO Corporation has built and opened three new tractor assembly centers in the United States. These centers are located near major ports, and close to markets with high demand for tractors manufactured and marketed by AGCO.

The three new assembly centers, located near Baltimore, MD. Houston, TX, and Tacoma, WA, are completed and taking tractor and parts inventory from AGCO manufacturing facilities around the world for the AGCO, Challenger, Fendt, Massey Ferguson and Valtra brands.

"Our goal is to react to our dealers' needs, and subsequently their customer needs on a timelier basis," says Bill Kaltenberg, Director of Operations. "It also allows us the flexibility to make configuration changes to better serve our customers' needs in a rapidly changing market. The centers provide facilities to customize tractors to the regional market and reduce the lead time on delivery to the customer."

The assembly centers have created more than 60 new full time jobs. Employees will assemble the tractors; and customize them to the market by installing attachments such as loaders and backhoes, three-point hitches, tires and wheels and additional North American content as requested by dealers and customers.

The AGCO Corporation assembly centers are standardizing quality control of each piece of equipment sold in North America by running them through consistent quality checks and audits at each facility.

"Our tractor plants have quality checks in place, but they can't apply these to the final tractor and attachments configuration that the North America customer wants the dealer to deliver," says Dennis Heinecke, vice president of sales operations for AGCO Corporation. "With these centers in place, we can easily apply factory-grade standardized quality checks to the tractor as ordered by the dealer or customer. This will ensure we have the quality our customers expect on every machine sold in North America."

"These three new facilities are state of the art, applying all of the latest technologies," Kaltenberg adds. "And they are also available for regional training meetings and product launches with dealers; helping us to make it more convenient for them to see our new products."