Liniar doubles capacity
Liniar has announced plans to double the size of its single-site, purpose-built headquarters in Derbyshire.
Group managing director, Martin Thurley, confirmed that work has already commenced on the site to build a new 350,000 ft² warehouse and manufacturing facility. Once complete (Q1 2025), he says, it will future-proof the business for the next 15 to 20 years.
“When visitors come to Liniar HQ, they always comment on how amazing the site is – from the extrusion hall to the lamination building to the twin mixing plants, up to and including our already vast warehouse,” Martin commented. “Once our extension plans are complete, we believe we’ll have the largest and most efficient single-site extrusion facility in Europe.
“Our philosophy has always been to maintain sufficient capacity headroom to allow us to grow as quickly as our customers grow, so even though we still have plenty of space and capacity today, we’re already planning for the next phase of exciting multi-year growth plans.
“The new warehouse facility will incorporate state-of-the-art, semi-automated storage, picking and loading solutions. Not only will this provide efficiency benefits, it will create an even safer working environment by significantly reducing manual handling and eliminating pedestrian and FLT interaction.
Martin continued: “Liniar is also implementing a solar PV strategy this year which will see solar panels installed on all existing and new buildings. We’ve made fantastic progress over recent years in significantly reducing our CO2 emissions by over 70%; this multi-million pound investment will further accelerate our plans to be carbon neutral by 2025.”
The site expansion plans follow Liniar’s most recent site development project, the addition of a multi-million-pound mixing plant which opened in March this year.
Martin explained: “We’re lucky to have a parent company like Quanex. The whole team believes in what we do and they have absolute faith in our future growth plans. Investment at this level doesn’t usually come easily, and we certainly don’t take it for granted – but with Quanex behind us, we know we’re in safe and ambitious hands.
“Whilst we’re extremely excited to be doubling the size of our operation to almost 800,000ft², we’re also conscious that we remain the same organisation and it’s ‘business as usual’ for customers. We continue to follow the same model that’s got us to where we are today in terms of service (99% OTIF), quality, innovation and being easy to deal with
“Liniar truly is a big business in terms of size, scale and ambition, but we’re not ‘big business people.’ It’s especially important that we convey this and continue to practice this philosophy for our employees and our customers’ benefit as we continue to grow. Put simply, we’re bigger not different, and we remain as approachable as ever.”
