Visitors to LS Group’s Langley Mill door factory will spot the posters. They feature members of the company’s 550-strong staff; they’re big, bold and plastered on walls inside and out.
One has an arrow pointing to a group of staff with the statement: “It takes this many people to make a quality product”. A second arrow picks out a single, anonymous silhouette: “And this many to make a bad one,” it warns.
The LS team evidently enjoyed making the posters. However, it’s more than a morale-boosting bit of fun. It’s part of a quality drive across the company, with similar posters festooning its plants in Sheffield, Barnstaple and London.
“We call it our ‘Quest for Quality’ programme and it also involves bonus and incentive schemes,” said managing director Roy Wakeman, a veteran of 35 years in the door business.
The scheme, he added, covers every aspect of the business, from raw materials handling, through to delivery. And, underlining the stress on quality, all the factories are also uprating ISO 9001 accreditation to the ISO 9001:2000 standard.
The practical aim of the initiative is to ensure products are made right first time. But the quality programme also forms part of the wider strategy underpinning the LS operation. The main thrust is that the company does not simply churn out slabs of wood or steel to fit holes in walls. The focus is performance-rated, bespoke and quality-assured products that fit customer requirements – and the underlying aim is better margins.
Poor at selling
“The timber industry has been good at trading, but poor at selling and marketing,” said Mr Wakeman. “We make products we can sell on the basis of performance and quality. That means a better premium for us and our customers.”
The value-added strategy has already paid dividends. In the mid-90s, turnover of the then Leaderflush business just nudged £10m. By last year a mix of organic growth, merger and acquisition had boosted that to £37m, with profits hitting £4.4m. “That makes us about four times the size of our nearest competitor in the bespoke door market,” said Mr Wakeman.
The performance is more impressive given that the company was moulded from four long-established manufacturers. When Mr Wakeman joined Leaderflush in 1995, the company was part of Whitecroft plc, along with Sheffield-based Longden Doors. In 1998 Whitecroft bought NT Shapland and Petter of Barnstaple after which the three were joined into one business and soon after put up for sale. Mr Wakeman and colleagues Nigel James, John Hardy, Ian Gooding, Kevin Eaton and Mike Burrage decided the opportunity was too good to miss and launched an MBO. They acquired 30% of the equity themselves, with the balance going to Graphite Capital, and restyled the business LS Group.
Today each LS Group factory retains individual areas of expertise. Sheffield’s joiners, for instance, make traditional style and rail, paneled products, while the specialities of Langley Mill include veneering and high-tech Plasform post-formed doors.
At the same time, the group acts as a co-ordinated manufacturing unit. Barnstaple and Langley Mill in particular collaborate closely, while the latter also makes timber security doors, leaving the London Multisecure plant to concentrate on steel.
“We’ve also improved efficiency by investing heavily in IT and centralising administration, sales and marketing at Langley Mill,” said Mr Wakeman. “We’re now introducing electronic resource planning.”
Building accoustics
The embryonic Part E rules on building acoustics are grist to the LS mill. “Doors make a major contribution in this area and we’re lobbying to improve specific sound levels in the regulations,” said Mr Wakeman. “Other manufacturers achieve insulation with extra thickness, but we use internal membranes and seals to keep the door at 44mm.”
Another critical development at LS has been the increase in the proportion of sales made up by completely factory-finished doorsets from 10% to 80%.
The strategy makes sense all round, explained Mr Wakeman. Firstly, it means the quality of the finished, installed product is less at the mercy of on-site assemblers and more under the company’s control (and it has developed a special rig for making doorsets horizontally, increasing precision).
Pre-assembly ties in with Egan report recommendations on raising construction sector efficiency and creates another hook for LS Group to ‘sell’ its doors.
As TTJ reported on May 11, LS Group set the seal on recent developments by launching a new corporate ID and remodeling into four product – and market-focused – divisions; LS Leaderflush Shapland, LS Longden, LS Primary and LS Multisecure. But if the competition thought this move signalled a period of quiet contemplation, they’d better think again. LS Group is now lining up a whole new set of goals.
One ambition is to sell more products electronically, with LS Primary in particular gearing up to be an on-line operation targeting merchants.
The company is taking a fresh slant on design too, challenging students at St Martins College in London to invent ‘intelligent doorsets’.
Also on the cards are partnerships with other manufacturers and/or acquisitions – and LS Group is evaluating options abroad as well as in the UK.
