Adient’s Greenfield facility is growing and on that growth was celebrated with a ribbon-cutting attended by company, local and regional officials.

The company is opening a storage facility at the Greenfield plant, and according to Adient’s Director of Operations NA Foam Business Unit, Todd Bruno, this represents a $6 million investment.

The storage facility will hold more than two million pounds of chemical, which is used in the manufacturing operations at all seven locations in North America. The need for the facility stems from a “significant weather event” that affected the chemical supplier in southern Texas, which meant no deliveries of the chemical for two weeks. Even without the chemical, customer orders were still coming in, Bruno said, and to be able to continue to meet those orders, Adient had to import the chemical by air charter from overseas, which cost the company millions.

Following that incident, Bruno said the company’s executive leadership challenged its people to get a plan in place to have the chemical more easily accessible and avoid such an issue in the future. Other areas of North America where Adient is located were looked at, but Greenfield’s central location was in its favor.

With the storage facility in Greenfield, the plant will be responsible for ordering, managing and shipping the chemical to the other Adient locations when there is need.

“This will position the Greenfield plant to be a shipping site for all other plants and positions the plant well for future opportunities,” Bruno said. “The organization could have put this investment anywhere and they chose Greenfield. That should make the plant team and the community proud.”

Angela Shepherd is a correspondent for the village of Greenfield.