Weston Group has shown its commitment to offsite building with the opening of its new complex in Essex, as I found out first-hand on an exclusive visit and tour.
Since building his first home in the 1980s, company founder Bob Weston has consistently demonstrated his ambitions in the housebuilding industry; always backing his words with actions.
The new £12m Braintree Logistics Centre, officially opened by the Weston Logistics division towards the end of 2018, is another step forward for the Weston Group as it sees the benefits of in-house assembly and quality control as an essential step to fulfil its growth ambitions.
The launch came after 18 months of meticulous planning and construction of the 75,000ft² complex. Designed and fitted using expert partners, the site provides a combination of warehousing, workshop and office space. It focuses on bringing in components and materials from a range of global suppliers.
“We can now provide bespoke fittings for up to 60 plots a day,” says Shaun Weston, managing director of Weston Logistics. “They’ll all be delivered to the right place at the right time. And we have the potential here to eventually deliver up to 5,000 a year.”
The items handled here include flooring, tiling, cladding, and other elements of kitchen and bathrooms. Weston Homes purchasers can choose from many specification options across their homes and this new facility allows all these to be brought together to ship to the appropriate development sites.
The company currently employs a team of 40 working at the centre, led by Shaun Weston, one of the Group’s first executive apprentices and now leading Weston Logistics. “This new centre transforms Weston Group’s logistics and offsite manufacturing capacity,” he says. “It enhances our ability to control our supply chain, improve the delivery of customer specification choices and ensure the quality of the products that form the specification of the homes we sell.”
Shaun Weston took me on a comprehensive tour of the Centre, clearly very proud of what it is already achieving and its potential to accommodate future housebuilding targets. The housebuilder currently completes over 700 units annually and has a £2bn pipeline of 6,000 new homes
We start in the 60,000ft² warehouse, 10m high and with 27, 8m-high storage aisles, which can hold more than 8,000 pallets, as well as store other materials. There’s a mix of standard shelf storage dimensions and special shelves correctly sized to take units completed at the factory. Details in an automated system ensure that stock is accurately delivered and collected at the appropriate part of the warehouse.
Materials and components are sourced from suppliers around the globe, from Europe to the Far East, usually arriving at either Felixstowe or London Gateway. Shipments are tracked through GPS and programmed to be delivered to one of the three bays in the warehouse.
“We’re usually open from 5.00am to 10.00pm,” says Weston, “but running a ‘double shift’ could cope with about 1,200 containers a year in the future.”
The bays have been designed to allow articulated lorries to deliver right into the warehouse, a very efficient system that has reduced the time to unload from around three hours to potentially just 15 minutes, with everything appropriately barcoded for speedy storage in the exactly right place in the warehouse. There’s also the added benefit of reducing the opportunity of damage occurring to the likes of marble and glass. All this is beneficial to ‘goods out’ as much as it is to ‘goods in’.
There are four Toyota forklifts operating here, all run on a state-of-the-art system to lead them around the floor and along the aisles to a very high degree of accuracy. I was invited to join one of the operators to see first-hand what one of these machines can do. The wire guidance can make the necessary small adjustments to line the forklift up very precisely at the end of the correct aisle, then allow very fast access back and forth, and lifting/collecting up and down over the 8m shelves. Every one of these happened impressively fast, and, according to the forklift operator, “it can go much quicker”.
Back to terra firma and we move along the warehouse to see another example of technology at work in what is known as the pedestrian picking area. This is where the team can coordinate each part of an order’s requirement, for example the correct number of tiles of the right colour.
The team uses a hand-held barcode scanner to identify each element and the software links all of this with the customer order. This scanning ensures that only the right pieces are selected, notifying any picking error as well as taking care of stock control.
Weston is using a warehouse management system called Dexterity. This uses what the manufacturers call a ‘live’ interface, which monitors every order in real time. It forms part of an integrated system communicating between management and back office software to automate procedures throughout the business.
The tour continues to the workshop, which occupies 10,000ft² of the facility. This is where materials are engineered and units assembled, with every step subject to vigorous quality control.
Each step of the production process has been equipped with the most up-to-date hardware. With such a variety of tasks being undertaken here, there is an equally diverse range of kit being used. Processing machines, engineering tools and assembly plants work to extremely precise measurements, with an accuracy level of ± 0.1mm.
While many materials are cut and coordinated here, it is currently just vanity units that are put together at the centre, though the potential is there to construct bathroom cabinets, kitchen units or wardrobes in future.
It was around three years ago that the company introduced its own brand, Fascino, as part of its kitchens and bathrooms, for spray-hose and instant boiling water taps and digitally controlled ‘smart’ taps, baths and showers. Another part of the Weston philosophy: a standard higher specification that differentiates it from the opposition. This is a big part of what Braintree Logistics Centre does, bringing assembly in-house with the precision equipment and digital tracking there to ensure each item is produced to the highest standard with minimal problems. The computer system can link any future problem with an item to precisely when and by whom it was made.
“Quality control is absolutely a key part of what we’re doing here,” says Shaun Weston, “and we constantly use the tracking results to review procedures to bring down future errors still further.”
As the Group’s chief executive Bob Weston, says: “The new Braintree Logistics Centre is a highly advanced distribution and build-offsite centre and represents the future of the volume housebuilding industry.
“Within the next 10 years, technology will allow for new homes to be fully manufactured offsite by robots and computer-assisted engineering tools; customer specification choices fully automated; with factory-made components then built onsite using machines like a highly advanced Lego system.”
“This step change will help enhance site safety, quality control and automotive-like precision. Our blue-chip factory at Braintree is another pioneering part of the process.”
It is certainly a forward-thinking facility that shows the industry that increasing both volume and quality standards can and should go hand-in-hand.
