YPIE Tour Blog Day 11: Halstock

Day 11 of the Young Professional Industry Experience tour and Katie Holden of Parker Knoll discusses the group’s visit to Halstock.

We were greeted by Jasper Heinrich, Operations Director, upon our arrival at Halstock – a  business to business company that design, manufacture and install high end interior installation solutions, mainly to residences in London.

Jasper looked after us the throughout the day, starting with a brief overview of the company before taking us on a tour of the manufacturing facility.

Halstock makes bespoke products, which is a stark contrast to all of our companies that mass produce products.

All of its products are skilfully hand crafted and there is very little automation in the manufacturing processes. Their quality control is of the upmost importance so each product is fully assembled and inspected before being dis-assembled prior to dispatch.

After lunch, we were split into two groups and sat down with various people to learn about their job roles. We learned that each project is assigned a Project Manager, who is then responsible for it  until it has been successfully installed.

Each Project Manager has a Production Designer and CAD Technician who work with them to help deliver the project.

Once the product/s have been designed and are ready to be manufactured, a Project Coordinator is given responsibility in the workshop to ensure that the project gets made on time and to the required specification.

Time is a key aspect to the working day as every project has a set time scale, so the hours are logged and analysed continually. What’s interesting is that an improvement log is filled in for every project to facilitate continuous improvement, with both saved and lost hours recorded.