by Serguey Shinder
For thirty years our largest housebuilding customer bought from us the way most builders do. Each site manager ordered for his own site, by phone, by email or through our trade website, and the nearest branch delivered on a lorry with a crane, usually the next day, often in part loads, to whoever was standing at the gate. At its peak that customer had forty one sites open with us at once.
In 2025 they opened a factory in the Midlands that builds timber frame wall panels, floor cassettes and roof sections, which are then lifted onto prepared foundations. By the spring of 2026 about a third of their new homes were being built that way, and their orders changed shape almost overnight. Timber, insulation, membranes, fixings and windows no longer went to forty sites. They went to one building, in full loads, against a production schedule planned three weeks ahead, into delivery slots booked by the hour.
Everything about how we serve customers was built for the other kind. Our branches each treat a site as a separate delivery address and promise next day on what they happen to hold. The factory wanted one supplier for the whole list, a forecast agreed in advance, stock set aside for it, and loads arriving in the order the production line would use them. A lorry three hours early had nowhere to unload. A load one item short stopped the line, and the factory knew what that cost them by the minute. In the first two months we missed a slot nine times, and they began taking their timber from a specialist importer that already supplied two other panel factories.
I expect much more of this over the next ten years. Not every house will be built in a factory. But a growing share of the materials for new homes will go to a few hundred production lines rather than thousands of muddy sites, and those customers behave less like builders and more like manufacturers. They will buy from suppliers who behave like suppliers to manufacturers.
We have started where we can. That factory is now served from one of our distribution centres instead of a branch, with a named planner who sees its production schedule and agrees a twelve week forecast with them every month. We hold dedicated stock on the lines we agreed. Lorries are loaded in the sequence the factory asks for, and anything short is known and discussed the day before, not discovered at the gate. We missed one slot in the last quarter, and the timber came back to us in September.
For thirty years the building site was where our customers' work happened. More of it is moving indoors, onto a schedule, and the schedule expects us to keep to it.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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