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Morris Furniture Group, Furnishing for the future

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Manufacturing in Action, Source : The Manufacturer
Published : June 2006

Morris Furniture Group brought lean manufacturing to a craft industry, with astonishing results. Now the company is moving into export markets. John O’Hanlon reports

Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur Of The Year programme has a fantastic reputation for digging out the country’s best talents and most innovative thinking, and over the years has thrown up some original and unexpected results. But it was not really a surprise when Robert Morris was chosen as Overall Scotland and Consumer Products winner in 2002, and has been asked to judge the awards in subsequent years. Over the years Morris, joint managing director with George McGraw, has shown remarkable leadership and tenacity through the lean times to grow Morris Furniture, the company founded by his grandfather more than 100 years ago, until today it is the market leader in all its sectors.

The Morris Furniture group now ranks as the UK’s largest independent furniture maker and comprises several divisions including the G-Plan brand, which it took over from Tyler Christie in 1997, bringing to it the investment and manufacturing expertise to bring the ailing 1960s icon into the 21st century. The group now comprises Zone living and dining room furniture; Relaxateeze luxury leather seating; Morris Furniture; G-Plan; Morris Office; Morris Contract; Diamik and Morris Homestyle.

When this magazine last looked at Morris furniture in 2002, it had recently adopted a new production planning and control package utilising MRP to assist in long term capacity planning and forward ordering for long lead-time materials and just-in-time (JIT). The idea was to apply the best practices of the automotive industry to the traditional craft processes associated with furniture building. This is something that Morris, now 59, has wanted to do ever since he joined the family firm at the age of 18.

At that time the company was under threat of closure; however Morris set himself the task of learning about the most efficient manufacturing environment he could find - the German automotive industry. Transferring technology and ideas from that environment to the firm’s 35-acre site at Rutherglen, the hub of a business that had four plants with more than a million square feet of production, has continued steadily. Manufacturing practices are now a million miles from the apron-and-ruler image the industry had when the G-Plan and Ercol plants at High Wycombe were seen to be industrialising furniture manufacture.

Neither craftsmanship nor design excellence had to be sacrificed though. In fact the introduction of lean manufacturing tools at Rutherglen has enabled Morris to retain these core values while bringing its lead times from weeks to days, especially in the case of its office product range. To achieve this it introduced measures more familiar in high volume engineering production, such as 5S, kaizen, just-in-time delivery, supplier managed kanbans and consignment stock. All these

techniques are aimed at cutting out non value added processes, reducing the volume of work in progress within the factory and keeping finished stock at a minimum.

Focusing on cost and efficiency turned the company around to the extent that in February this year it was able to virtually double its size in the biggest acquisition of its life.

The take-over of Homestyle Kitchens and Bedrooms of Cumbernauld, Glasgow has increased Morris’s workforce to over 1000, making it the largest UK employer, and boosting its turnover by £20 million a year to more than £75 million. Morris says the deal is ‘a marriage made in heaven’, with the Homestyle operations overlapping very little with Morris’s existing markets. “This is a huge acquisition for us and we are very proud of becoming the first furniture manufacturer in the UK to take its workforce to over 1000 employees, which will increase over the next year with further new jobs.”

All of the Homestyle staff are being transferred from Cumbernauld to Morris’s one million square-foot Rutherglen facility, which will now run four shifts to accommodate the bigger workforce. Nobody was made redundant as a result of the Homestyle acquisition, and Homestyle’s managing director, Alan Love, who founded the company in 1993, will retain his title as head of the new division. Love said that the deal with Morris represented a ‘perfect match’. Homestyle excels in sales and marketing although “manufacturing always held us back”, he says; an admission supported by a certain amount of disgruntled blogging that has pinpointed a weakness in meeting delivery promises. That should be a thing of the past now that operations have been transferred to Morris’s state-of-the-art site, Alan Love believes “the facilities they have are just second to none so we can concentrate on selling the product, which I believe we do very well, while Morris looks after the manufacturing side.”

Having secured its leading position in the UK, we can expect to hear more of Morris on the international furniture scene, particularly in Europe. The way was opened up in 2004 when the group’s leather upholstery company, Relaxateeze, won its first contracts in Greece, Belgium, Germany and Italy after showcasing its Club range at the Udine Chair Exhibition in Italy.

The launch of export trade for Morris Furniture Group has been the catalyst to a new market for international buyers. The success of this first foray into the export market was attributed to the lack of club-style leather upholstery available to Europe, and the demand for this niche product. “We recognised that we are in a small niche market of trend-led club furniture, and wondered if this existed in Europe. Not only did we discover that it didn’t exist, but there was a real demand for it!” said George McGraw at the time. “Exhibiting Relaxateeze at Udine is the first calculated step of our move into the export market and we hope to be exporting products from all of our companies by the end of 2005,” added Robert Morris

It would of course be a challenge to roll out Morris’s service departments to an export market. All customers are able to benefit from Morris’s planning service - strengthened now by the expertise brought by Homestyle, but two departments target professional markets. One is the contract division; the other is Diamik, a company that designs, plans and project manages facility expansion in schools, for example the new Science Centre at Kirkham Grammar School in Lancashire. Diamik was commissioned by the school to design, supply and install the furniture for three new science laboratories and two prep rooms, at a cost of £77,000. “It has always been our aspiration that all science teaching should take place within the laboratory environment, and having been previously frustrated in this by lack of facilities, we are now able to provide our pupils with a wonderfully exciting venue for their scientific studies,” said head teacher Douglas Walker.

Morris Furniture has come a long way since 1904, when it made furniture for the luxury liners that were built in the Clyde shipyards, but the spirit of entrepreneurship is alive and well in the person of its managing director. Nobody could call Robert Morris risk averse; in his spare time he likes nothing better than to go skydiving.