YPIE Blog Day Eight: Silentnight

Lisa Sandall, designer at Ercol, writes about what the Young Professional Industry Experience group learned on their trip to Silentnight.

Today we visited bed manufacturer Silentnight and were hosted for the day by 2016 YPIE participant Tom Firth and manufacturing director Steve Petrovic.

It was a really informative, well organised day that pulled in talks and demonstrations from new product development (NPD) and introduction (NPI), manufacturing, testing, finance, warehousing, transport and training & development.

The session demonstrated how each department at Silentnight works seamlessly together to supply new, fairly priced products across a range of markets.

Silentnight is similar to Ercol as it manufactures in house and makes products to order across a large number of Stock Keeping Units (SKUs), which can cause issues with increased complexity impacting on manufacturing efficiency and often a point of heated debate between production and new product development teams.

We learned that Silentnight has its own in house SATRA accredited test lab, which was a very impressive facility. One of the most impactful things we saw during the day was the difference between regular and fire retardant (FR) foam.

During a match test the FR foam melted in a small area and extinguished within 40 seconds, but the standard foam was fully ablaze and releasing plumes of black smoke in the same time period.

With a standard response time of 7-9 minutes by fire services, the session highlighted the importance of buying beds from a trusted, fully accredited source.

Silentnight has recognised the issue of an ageing workforce and Steve discussed how the company has gone to great lengths to grow skills within the business, from shop floor right up to higher management with an award winning apprenticeship schemes across the business, as well as support for degree and masters level qualifications.

Silentnight clearly values its staff and want to ensure they’re well trained, skilled and happy in their roles.