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Relentlessly pursuing incremental productivity gains and waste elimination
Individually, these gains may appear small, but taken together and at scale, they can be game-changing.
Rapid Coupler
Patented plastic interconnector for “plug and play” connections of hot and cold water pipework.
“…the equivalent of a 3-pin plug for hot & cold plumbing”
UK patent applied for, and published by UKIPO under number: GB2612089.
Removes the need for plumbing connections to be made to install the assemblies; the assemblies are installed in minutes by trained general operatives, rather than hours, if plumbed traditionally.
Removes the requirement for a qualified plumber to make these plumbing connections (who is freed up to be deployed elsewhere, such as final commissioning and supervision, for example).
Laser-etched boards
No pencil marks here! Each board is laser-etched. The programme for the laser etching is generated directly from the CAD model. This process removes the human element from the marking up process and ensures that each board is identical, whilst being quicker and repeatable.
The laser etching removes a fraction of a mm from the surface of the board, so the etched cross-hair at the screw positions allows the screw point to be drawn towards the centre of cross hair, even on OSB board. This is how remove the time for manually marking up and how we guarantee a repeatable accuracy of less than +/- 1mm.
Low profile clip
Product development of a glass reinforced nylon (GRN) low profile clip, which secures the centre-line of a drainage pipe, 10mm closer to the backing board compared to a standard clip.
The same clip profile can accommodate both imperial and metric pipe sizes; whilst the single point of attachment (single screw hole) reduces assembly time significantly compared to a traditional pipe clip.
Digital shop-floor
No marked-up paper drawings on the shop-floor!
In order to ensure correct version control, only the latest version of the drawing is released for production by the Design Dept. via the shop-floor tablets. The shop-floor can capture comments onto the manufacturing drawings, for review by the Design Dept., but cannot update the drawing itself.
Strict version control becomes particularly important when managing a design update during production of series.
Pipe cap supports
Proposition development of stacked pipe support manifold and product development of GRN pipe cap, allows standard 22mm pipe to be used as an up-stand, bolted to the backing board.
Using short lengths of 22mm dia. plastic pipe as upstands allows for offcuts to be re-used, resulting in virtually zero waste; and the resulting bolted assembly is far more mechanically robust than the typical “block of wood” pipe support used traditionally, whilst being quicker to assemble.
