West Control Solutions, the global specialist in advanced temperature control, has recently completed a major expansion of its UK manufacturing centre in Brighton.

The move has created new jobs and is increasing output capability by up to 25,000 units a year.

The new facilities represent the completion of a project to boost the company’s European production operations in the UK and form part of a long term programme of investment in continuous product and service development.

Previously, West Control Solutions had operated two production centres, in the UK and Germany, with the latter being outsourced to a third party supplier. Following a fire at the supplier’s factory, in December 2013 the decision was to bring the manufacturing in-house. The move would affect four production cells; manufacturing the and PMA Railine. West Control Solutions also decided to use the opportunity to update the manufacturing process of these products from batch processing used in Germany to adopt the ‘one-piece flow’ lean manufacturing methodology already in existence at the Brighton factory, thereby helping to reduce inventory and improve quality control procedures.

The relocation of manufacturing took place across two phases in February and March 2014 and was completed with less than one week of downtime across all four production cells. Insourcing the manufacturing of the PMA product lines has resulted in an additional 45 vendors being effectively added into the supply chain.

In addition, eight new permanent positions have been created in the Brighton head office to cope with the demands of manufacturing an extra 25,000 units a year. Lead times for all affected product lines have since returned to pre-transfer levels of three days across all products.