Innovation day for key customers

A range of drywall contractors – including ACE Partitions, Broadsword, Coneelly, GPS Drywall, Mark One Interiors, Mansell Finishes and Taylor Hart – and some main contractors met our Product Development team in Avignon to gain an insight into our innovation pipeline.

Our Technical Development Centre is one of three major R&D centres in the Etex Group exclusively dedicated to innovation. This is a Centre for Excellence for dry construction and it’s role is to create, test and develop products and systems for the construction sector.

Customer insight and collaboration is a very important part of the innovation pipeline. For this visit, we focused on a simple proposition - what can we do to help drywall contractors improve their site productivity?

Site wastage, manual handling, labour costs, speed of installation, ease of installation, workability, cost and performance were discussed at length for every innovation.

Developing a new product requires skilled expertise in building design, physics and system modelling. Some products are put through 10,000 sets of tests to ensure that the system meets all of the required performance targets – enabling us to provide that very important Lifetime Warranty.

We very much appreciated the time investment made by our customers for this trip. It makes great commercial sense for manufacturers and customers to work together to solve market needs and problems.