US computer giant Dell is introducing new work practices in an effort to attract more workers and reduce the number of employees leaving its manufacturing facilities in Limerick. With 3,500 workers spread across its operations in Castletroy and Raheen, the computer company, which sells directly to customers, is the largest employer in the mid-west. It has been operating a "swing shift" operation with manufacturing workers operating alternate morning and evening shifts every week.

But the demand for workers - the company is taking on 100 employees a week - means it is trying to retain workers while enhancing the overall attractiveness of working at the three plants in Raheen and Castletroy.

The company has built two prayer rooms for Malaysian employees at its new European Manufacturing Facility (EMF3) at Raheen, located next to EMF1 and which commenced production four weeks ago. Mr Pat Casey, human resources director, said 105 Malaysians had been brought over from the Dell plant in Penang, Malaysia, recently to train personnel in a new production system based around three-man teams, rather than the traditional production line, based on the Henry Ford model.

The company was recently offering immediate interviews on its Recruitment Open Day and successful applicants were being given a next-day start as factory floor operatives. EMF3 will employ 1,900 people, including office workers who account for about 40 per cent of all employees across the three plants.

Mr Casey said the number of factory operators leaving Dell's employment was "probably higher than we would like". Next month, the basic wage rate will be increased from £4.72 (€6) to £5 (€6.4) an hour, and the company's strategy is to have a permanent workforce, as it is more productive than having large numbers of temporary workers. The proportion of permanent employees has risen from 45 per cent to 90 per cent of the workforce.

"We get an opportunity to invest in training . . . the challenge at this point in time is growing our business," he says.

Personnel who now agree to work the swing shift will earn a basic £6 an hour and there are performance-related bonuses. In response to Dell's growth and the tightening labour market, he says the company will also look at permanent part-time positions as an alternative, so that it can employ working mothers and other sectors of the labour force with special needs.

He said the two-shift practice the company has operated to date has been "restrictive". "Now we are offering permanent evenings, fixed permanent days, two-shift rotating, weekend shifts for the colleges." Currently, there is a list of people who want to transfer from the swing shift system to a day job. "Flexibility is a two-way street. We are willing to offer as much as we humanly can with the business constraints we have," he said.

Many students would have worked at the plant before entering college and now do weekend work, he adds. Asked about the difficulties the plant has in finding personnel, he says every human resources manager in the State is concerned about labour shortages. For him, the problem is bigger because of the scale of the operations. "We could not grow at the rate at which we are growing without doing more innovative things to augment our workforce . . . we are growing at 30 per cent quarter on quarter."

Recently, the company introduced a weekly lottery for workers, and has distributed 25,000 leaflets in the Limerick area over a four-day period.

"It was very much designed for short-term work - distributing, packing, shipping, and other areas of our operation that we know we can train people for, pretty quickly, and continue to grow our permanent workforce at the rate we want to."

Dell also placed billboard advertisements, drafted in some of its office workers to manufacturing, and brought in workers from its suppliers on a short-term basis. Mr Casey says some suppliers' operations are counter-cyclical to Dell's. "It has worked out very well."

He says employees have done "a fantastic job" coping with large demand at different times. This month, the company has manufacturing operations continuing around the clock, seven days a week, as it experiences the greatest demand ever.

Mr Casey says the company is lucky to be where it is in terms of catchment area, describing north Cork, Tipperary, Kerry and Clare, as well as Limerick, being within a 40-minute commuting time. It is, he says, a complex start-up, "an entirely new process for us".

"It has effectively started. What we are talking about is how we ramp it to full capacity. It will probably take six months."

The basic month-long training period involves orientation and safety procedures and basic skills. "I would say you would be proficient and have the L-plates on after three to five weeks. After that, it is upskilling and new product introduction."

EMF3 belongs to a new generation of factories. It will have a Banklink machine, a locker room, and an Internet room. Food operations are franchised to Sutcliffe Catering. It also incorporates the European Data Centre for Operations, which houses the servers and back-office systems supporting Dell's European activities.

EMF3's capacity is to have eight production lines, each able to do 200 units per hour - this will be reached in December. On a two-shift-a-day basis, this means it could produce more than 25,000 units, the most common of which sell for between £1,000 and £1,400.

The workers are employed by the world's richest thirty-something, Mr Michael Dell, who is worth more than $16.5 billion (€15 billion). Everything about the 33-year-old US entrepreneur is big. His company, Dell Computers, had a $21.7 billion (£16 billion) turnover and, last year, made after-tax profits of $1.46 billion.

In the Limerick region, it pays more than £1 million in wages every week, amounting to an annual wage bill of £55 million. The Irish operations include the sales support office in Bray, Co Wicklow, employing 850 people.

At the end of last month, the first computers were assembled and shipped from EMF3, Dell's first custom-built manufacturing unit in Limerick. Since it commenced operations in Limerick in 1991, the US company has taken over buildings vacated by Atari and AST. Together, they supply the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region.

The new EMF3 building, still part-factory, part-construction site, bears out the vastness of the Dell empire. Built in beside EMF1, the building comfortably emcompasses the area of four football pitches. Inside the building, which has 31,000 square metres under a roof, a galaxy of lights greet the eye. In fact, there were 7,000 fluorescent tubes installed.

EMF3 was a huge undertaking for the main contractors, Jacobs Engineering and Sisk who constructed it with 1,200 tonnes of steel, removed 28,000 cubic metres of rock and poured 8,600 cubic metres of concrete. The plant adds another 600 car spaces to the 1,400 Dell has at the other two sites. When fully-operational, it will have the capacity to produce half of the annual output from Limerick.