Volvo Car Corporation's product portfolio will see major upgrades in 2013 and several carlines will be renewed during next year. This is a development project which to a certain extent has been carried out by technical consultants employed by Volvo Car Corporation on temporary contracts. With the completion of this project, the company will phase out 300-400 consultancy contracts during the remainder of 2012.
As described in connection with the company's financial report which was presented recently, Volvo Car Corporation is using temporary employees to achieve a certain level of flexibility in parts of the operations, mainly within Manufacturing and Research and Development.
"By using highly skilled technical consultants in our engineering operations we have the flexibility to tailor the workforce to short-term needs in our car projects. This flexibility is vital to Volvo Car Corporation as a small car manufacturer," says Peter Mertens, Senior Vice President, Research and Development at Volvo Car Corporation. "We have now completed a development phase for upgrading major parts of our product portfolio which will be launched next year. We will therefore carry out a planned adaptation of the size of our organisation."
The changes of the consultancy workforce will have no impact on Volvo Car Corporation's product cycle plan which includes the introduction of the all-new SPA (Scalable Product Architecture) platform in 2014.
With this phase out, Volvo Car Corporation will reduce the number of technical consultants employed from approximately 1,200 to 800-900.
