Centre of Glass Unit Excellence

To give customers the design choices they want, in a complete range of sizes suitable for any door range we have created a centre of glass unit excellence in Hawick. Offering seven glass processes onsite, and new warehousing just around the corner, means more than 2,500 IGUs a week are manufactured, packaged and despatched from the transformed facility.

The seven processes are:

Several factors came together to precipitate these changes and offer more flexibility for customers. There was a need to offer our complete range in a 26mm cassette to accommodate DoorCo’s new flip cassette. The result of this is what we call onshoring, a hybrid manufacturing process where we import specialist glass from China, and manufacture the finished IGU – in any size unit – in Scotland. An additional benefit of this is that we are now transporting less air, and when shipping costs and schedules have caused so many supply chain issues in the last 18 months, this can only be positive for customers.

This new hybrid manufacturing process means we can offer 24, 26 and 28mm units with options for Low E and laminated glass and that means they’re suitable for all composite doors as well as timber doors that require a slimmer glass unit size.

Over the May Bank Holiday Weekend we moved all the glass for IGU manufacture from Manchester to Hawick. The new warehouse racking is awesome! The Bendi forklift design means we can put the racks closer together and taller which gives us more storage space than ever before.

The factory flow has been designed from goods inwards, through all the processing to delivery. We even reuse and recycle as many of the timber crates used for shipping as we can. They are super strong and secure so that we can always minimise the number of breakages.

We are very pleased to say that less than a month after the changes, the factory is working really well and we invited Nathan Bushell, editor for Glass Times to see the new processes in situ – look out for his article.