Volume housebuilder Weston Group has launched a new factory in Braintree, Essex, capable of building 5,000 offsite homes a year.
The £12m, 9,970m2 Braintree Logistics Centre claims to introduce automotive-industry logistics, assembly and quality control to housebuilding.
Built over a period of 18 months, the new complex has a 5,574m2, 10m-high warehouse and a 929m2 manufacturing workshop. It currently has 40 staff including technical engineers previously employed at Airbus Industries.
Weston Group said IT would allow it to track raw materials, goods and components being freighted from around the world via GPS from the complex's control centre.
At the centre, deliveries are unloaded, computer-coded, barcoded and stored in as little as 15 minutes until needed before being retrieved from an 8m-high pallet racking complex with 27 storage aisles. They are then assembled and tested using machines and automated processes.
Buyers will be able to choose a range of options to customise in their homes, including kitchen units, colours, worktops and bathroom suites, before the homes are packaged and shipped to development sites.
Bob Weston, chief executive of Weston Group said: "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 on-site 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."
Shaun Weston, managing director of Weston Logistics added: "This new Braintree Logistics Centre transforms Weston Group's logistics and offsite manufacturing capacity and 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. Weston Group has a £2bn development pipeline of 6,000 new homes and this new complex helps us manage this expansion. Streamlined processing and inventory also allows for significant cost efficiencies and reducing the processing time for customer orders."
