Page 28 - ESG report

Sustainable
manufacturing
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Dams UK manufacturing operations are made up of a wood mill
and upholstery factory. We cut, edge, and finish all our MFC
products, design the steelwork and upholster our own seating
ranges at our state of the art production facility.
Since 2018 we have invested over £19M in capital expenditure
on new buildings, new equipment and new systems to secure
the long term position of the company and employees. We
have invested £6M in 2022/23 alone on new machinery, IT
infrastructure and our warehouse extension, which has created
over 50 new permanent jobs.
As our turnover increases, we benefit from economies of
scale within both our distribution network and from increased
purchasing power within our supply chain. We have over £7m
finished stock holding covering over 9,500 product lines and a
national delivery network already servicing over £63m turnover of
office furniture and soft seating business.
When Dams Furniture obtained ISO 9001: 2015 in August 2019 it
demonstrated to our UKAS & ASI Accredited Certification Body a
high degree of compliance and a committed approach to driving
business improvements and product innovation using our Quality
Management System.
Wood mill
The Homag Sawteq B-400 HKL is capable of cutting up to
50,000 panels per week with members of the Dams team even
travelling to Germany for some training on the software.
We also have an additional double sided edge bander with
the new SCM Stefani EVO C machine, which supported with a
stand-alone, state-of-the-art extraction system as we look to do
everything we can to reduce our carbon footprint.
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Upholstery Factory
In our upholstery factory we’ve used C-Gex machines for the
upholstery of chair seats and backs, which use the drawstring
method on a heated bed filled with glass beads, which
allow for the covers to be glued and fitted neatly. And they
are so good that we’ve just taken delivery of another C-Gex
machine as we look to reduce our lead times on made-to-
order task chairs.
We’ve also completely re-designed the factory floor and
manufacturing processes in our upholstery factory to
improve the flow of products through the site and to reduce
manufacturing time. This means that we can make our range
of office chairs and soft seating products quicker so we can
reduce our lead times, with an improved rate of on-time
deliveries, and enhancing the overall product quality of our
upholstered products.
We took delivery of a new Homag BMG 310
Cenateq CNC shaping, drilling and routing machine to run
alongside our existing shaping machines to help ensure all our
standard wood products are consistently available from stock.
The brand new Homag Drilltec D-500 has two tasks - drilling and
dowelling - so it can drill panels, inject glue and then insert dowels
for improved efficiency.
The Baz 722, also from Homag, specialises in routing and edging
two completely different wood panels, both at the same time!