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Dell Slated to Officially Open Forsyth County, N.C., Plant Oct. 5

Posted on: Tuesday, 23 August 2005, 21:00 CDT

Aug. 24-- Dell Inc. said yesterday that it plans to officially open its Forsyth County plant on Oct. 5.

The company also said it is on target to meet an internal deadline of Sept. 19 for assembling the first personal computer at the 527,000-square-foot plant.

Dell executives previously had said that Sept. 19 was the goal for shipping the first computers to customers from the Forsyth plant, its largest and most modern.

That's why community officials said they chose Sept. 19 as the target date for completing the 30 days of Dell events that are recognizing the company and its local work force. A list of those events, which began Friday, can be found at www.30daysofDell.com.

"Sept. 19 is more of an internal milestone we need to hit to stay on track and be able to ramp up production for the fourth quarter," said Travis Simpson, the vice president of Dell's North Carolina operations. "It also is a milestone for seeing if the flow of production at the facility is sufficient.

"We will hold our public celebration for the plant on Oct. 5. But we will still have volume production goals to meet in November and we will continue to ramp up as we add staff and add lines."

Dell already has trained about 170 employees and plans to have a staff of at least 500 by year's end and 1,500 by September 2006.

Community officials said they had been communicating for several weeks with Dell about the recognition effort, but tried to keep the breadth of the events a secret until the ceremony on Friday.

"In our conversations with them, they told us they might produce computers prior to Sept. 19, so that's why we decided to do 30 days of Dell instead of a countdown event," said Gayle Anderson, the president of the Greater Winston-Salem Chamber of Commerce.

"We decided to do a month, instead of 100 days, because we felt arranging a month's worth of events was more manageable. We've already had more companies call us to say they want to participate in the events as well."

Dell spokeswoman Donna Oldham said that anyone interested in working for the company needs to submit their information at www.dell.com. She said that www.workatdell.com, previously used by local applicants for submitting information, might not be activated again by the company.

Dell signed Friday its contract with Winston-Salem, Forsyth County and other local agencies, which provides for up to $37.2 million in local incentives to the company to cover startup, tax relief and other costs.

The nonprofit Institute for Constitutional Law is challenging those incentives, as well as the $242 million offered by the state, in a lawsuit.

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Copyright (c) 2005, Winston-Salem Journal, N.C.

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DELL,

Source: Winston-Salem Journal

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