By Martin Nettleton, managing director, Euroglaze

With installers and stockists at the sharp end of the market facing squeezed margins and persistently sluggish retail demand, it’s no surprise that most conversations between fabricators and trade customers at the moment still start with price.

I’ve been in trade fabrication for enough years to know that price will always matter. In fact, I’ve spent 20+ years building Euroglaze into one of the most efficient, lean manufacturing environments in the industry so that we can always be amongst the most competitive on price as well as on lead times. But I still don’t believe that the price you pay for a window or door dictates the profit you make on a job. It’s the total amount of time you spend on that job that is by far the biggest factor.

Installers don’t lose profit on a job because their window is a few pounds more expensive per frame; they lose profit if a unit is manufactured to the wrong size, it arrives scratched or damaged, a delivery is incomplete, or they have to spend 40 minutes on the phone to their supplier trying to resolve a problem.

All these kinds of errors waste time that could be spent on site and often even trigger a return visit. And calculating how much that time and revisit is actually worth to an installation business is key to understanding just how much profit is being lost.

If you take a two man fitting team on £250 each per day for example, every half day wasted costs the business a minimum of £250 between them. Just a couple of wasted half days per month adds up to at least £6,000 a year. And the cost isn’t just the labour – it is the extra admin time, additional fuel and travel time and disruption to the rest of the week’s schedule, not to mention the knock on effects of rebooked customers, postponements for other trades and reputational damage.

Those wasted hours aren’t just an inconvenience – they represent real margin erosion.
As I see it, fabricators who aren’t focused on zero manufacturing errors, zero quality rejections and zero incomplete deliveries can effectively be costing their customers money.

At Euroglaze, our commitment to lean manufacturing and a Quality Circles philosophy embedded right across the business ensures that lead times are as short as three days on some products and there are close to zero QC rejections in our factory.

As a long established trade fabricator of Rehau and Liniar frames with capacity for 800 frames per week at our factory in Barnsley, our competitive advantage comes from the fact that we offer our customers what is probably the ultimate in predictability. Our stockists and installers know that orders from Euroglaze will arrive in full and on time (our 2026 OTIF for white PVC-U frames is 100% on an impressive three-day lead time), they won’t have to worry about errors, and our customer service team will respond quickly via a phone call, WhatsApp, email or even video to resolve any issues. When new customers come on board with us, we get lots of feedback on how quick and easy we are to deal with.

When they buy from Euroglaze, they are buying confidence that we will always deliver what we promise and, crucially won’t waste any of their valuable time.