Glass Times editor, Luke Wood, visits Reynaers UK’s Knowledge Centre, a facility designed for product testing as well as a valuable asset for customers to keep ahead of product design and best practice.

With legislation placing a greater emphasis on companies to demonstrate product compliance, Reynaers’ Technology Centre, located at the Reynaers Campus in Duffel, represents a real advantage for customers of the aluminium system house.

When I visited the facility a few years ago, I was given a tour of the impressive testing capabilities for wind load, watertightness, acoustic & thermal performance, fire & impact resistance and more besides.

Thanks to the Technology Centre, Reynaers has one of – if not the most – comprehensive test data sets in the industry, helping to achieve certification from a range of independent notified bodies.

In addition, Reynaers UK has also established a testing and training facility, based at its HQ in Birmingham, an asset that is proving to be equally as valuable for partners in the UK, particularly for those operating in the commercial sectors.

As Reynaers’ technical director, John McComb, explained on a recent visit to what is billed as the Knowledge Centre, it is now more important than ever to be ahead of regulations following the Building Safety Act, and to be able to help guide customers through new regulatory processes.

Reynears’ free of charge training courses are designed to build expertise, with a range of practical and theoretical options via the Knowledge Centre that help fabricators stay ahead of the latest systems, fabrication techniques and installation best practices. The company offers an extensive range of ‘R Modules’, including independently accredited GQA courses, that are designed as follows:

R1: Welcome to Reynaers. Basic Awareness of Reynaers products and services and how to make the most of a partnership with Reynaers.
R2: Product specific training, including a new GQA offering. Reynaers is now a GQA accredited training centre offering official certification that helps customers in evidencing competency.
R3: ReynaPro software. An overview and usage of the system.
R4: Fabrication training at Reynaers UK.
R5: Fabrication training at client premises.
R6: Blue Box training (on-site session to identify common issues and how to avoid or manage them).
R7: Site visit. Quality assessment of installed products – often offered as part of a supply chain agreement

During my visit I could see plenty of evidence of past testing, including various examples of Vision 7 products having been put through their paces, demonstrating the robust design of Reynaers’ leading commercial door system.

In addition, the testing facility was also being used to demonstrate some new hardware solutions from Sobinco, a brand that has traditionally enjoyed a strong working relationship with Reynaers.

Representatives from Sobinco were presenting their products and Reynaers’ in-house testing team were putting them through their paces, by fitting and operating them under ‘real world’ conditions.

The benefits of this are twofold; it helps to identify any issues before they reach fabricator customers, but also it means Reynaers’ technical team can fully understand how the products work, which means they are better equipped to support customers if they are adopted.

John McComb commented:

“Hardware can be independently tested, well designed and offer a lot of advantages for fabricators and end users, but we want to know whether it has any vulnerabilities – can it be fitted incorrectly, is there a way the design could be improved, and how practical are certain functions for end users once installed.

“We can explore all these possibilities and offer feedback to suppliers. It helps to ensure we only introduce hardware solutions that match our own demanding design requirements and helps to maintain the high standards our customers expect.”

Customers can also use the Knowledge Centre for training and product familiarity, where they can use pre-assembled products that can be taken apart and put back together again, and in a controlled environment that is much more suitable for learning, compared to a busy factory floor and all its distractions.

As John concluded, it’s about building competency in the supply chain at a time when the industry is under increasing pressure to meet higher standards of regulatory compliance.