Search for a sliding door factory with 100,000 square metres and you will find one quickly. Search for the same phrase with 87,000 in it and you will find nothing, because nobody writes that. The roundness of the number is the first thing worth noticing about it, and it is not the most important thing. The most important thing is that a square metre is a unit of floor, and almost nothing that decides whether your doors arrive on time is decided on a floor.
This article takes apart one headline figure. It does not argue that scale is meaningless. Scale buys real things, and we list them. It argues that the figure you were given answers a question nobody asked, and that there are four or five questions hiding behind it that you can ask in an email and get a real answer to in a day.
ALPES publishes a 100,000 square metre manufacturing base and two production centres, in Foshan and Zhaoqing, Guangdong. That is a true statement about our business and it appears on our own site. It is also, on its own, one of the weakest pieces of information a buyer can hold, because it is a statement about a building at a single instant and your order is a motion through that building over a period of weeks.
Here is the distinction in one line. A floor area tells you how much can be standing in the building at once. It does not tell you how fast things leave. Those are different quantities, they have different units, and the number that converts the first into the second is a duration. Ask a factory for its area and you will get an answer. Ask it how many days a panel spends between being cut and being loaded into a container, and you will usually get a pause, because that is the number that exposes everything.
So this is not a piece about how big we are. It is a piece about what a factory-size claim can and cannot carry, written by the people who make the claim, with the arithmetic shown so you can repeat it.
Before the technical argument, a small piece of evidence about the number itself. Factory-area claims in this industry cluster on powers of ten. A public search returns one aluminium supplier describing a factory covering an area of 100,000 square metres with modern aluminium extrusion lines; another describing a 100,000 square metre manufacturing base in one province plus a separate 20,000 square metre base in another, presented together as 120,000 across two hubs; a third giving a site of 100,000 square metres of which a door, window and curtain wall workshop occupies 20,000. We publish 100,000 ourselves.
Not one of those is a measurement that was rounded after being taken. They are all the same kind of object: a marketing unit that happens to be written in the same symbol as an engineering unit. That is not dishonesty. It is a convention, and like every convention it costs you information.
| Public claim | What it is attached to | What a buyer can conclude |
|---|---|---|
| 100,000 square metres, single site | Land or buildings, not stated which | Nothing about output. The workshop may be one fifth of it. |
| 120,000 square metres across two bases, split 20,000 and 100,000 | One base named as research and custom work, the other as extrusion and volume | A great deal. The split tells you which base your order lands in, and that is the question that matters. |
| 100,000 square metre site, 20,000 square metre door and window workshop | Land area and production area, both stated | Five to one. This is the most useful page in the set precisely because it gives two numbers instead of one. |
| 21,000 square metre plant with a vertical powder line taking 9,200 mm profiles | A smaller plant publishing a longer capability | The smaller number does the longer panel. Area and capability are not ordered the same way. |
That last row is the one to keep. A plant roughly one fifth the size of the headline figure publicly lists a vertical powder coating line able to finish profiles up to 9,200 millimetres long. Size and capability are not the same ordering. A buyer who ranks suppliers by floor area is ranking by a property that does not decide what those suppliers can physically make.
The word "factory" does no work in the sentence. What is being measured could be any of six things, and each of them produces a different relationship between the quoted figure and the amount of door that comes out of the building.
| Candidate meaning | What is inside it | What it decides for your order |
|---|---|---|
| Site area | Land, roads, yards, landscaping, car parks, everything inside the fence | Very little. A large part of it is where trucks turn around. |
| Building footprint | Ground covered by roofs, counted once | How much can be under cover at once, which matters in a monsoon climate. |
| Total floor area | Every storey added together, so a three-storey building contributes three times its footprint | Almost nothing about a door line. Doors are wide and flat and do not stack upwards. |
| Production workshop area | Cutting, machining, assembly, glazing, testing | The closest thing to a useful number, and the one most rarely printed alone. |
| Warehouse and staging area | Glass on frames, profile bundles, work in progress, finished goods awaiting containers | Whether your whole project can be held and shipped as one batch. This is real value. |
| Office, showroom and living accommodation | Sales floor, sample gallery, canteen, dormitory | Nothing about your order. It is the part you are shown first. |
When a supplier gives one number and not a breakdown, the honest reading is that you have been given the largest of the six. When a supplier gives two, as one of the public examples above does, you have been given something you can actually reason with. Two numbers beat one large one, every time.
There is a way to make this concrete without asking anyone to disclose anything. Industrial land in China is governed by published control indicators, and those indicators tie site area, footprint and floor area together with ratios that anyone can run in either direction. The national control indicator document published through the State Council portal lists, for metal products manufacturing, a plot ratio control value above 0.8 and a building coverage control value above 40 per cent. Local implementing documents commonly restate a floor area ratio of at least 1.0, building coverage of at least 40 per cent and green space of no more than 20 per cent for general industrial land. The national text also caps administrative office and living accommodation at 7 per cent of total site area.
| If 100,000 square metres is | Then, using the published ratios | What that means |
|---|---|---|
| Site area | Floor area at least about 80,000 square metres at a plot ratio of 0.8; roofed footprint at least about 40,000 square metres at 40 per cent coverage | A site of 100,000 can legally hold 80,000 of building and still be described by either number. |
| Total floor area | Site of roughly 125,000 square metres at a plot ratio of 0.8 | The same sentence now describes a site one quarter larger. |
| Either of the above | Up to 20,000 square metres may be green space; up to 7,000 square metres may be office and living accommodation | A fifth of the number can be lawn and a further slice can be a canteen, with no misstatement at all. |
Run that in both directions and you get the article's first uncomfortable conclusion. "One hundred thousand square metres of site" and "one hundred thousand square metres of building" describe factories that differ by about a quarter in land and by more in everything that matters, and both can be printed in the same sentence with the same number and the same units. Nobody has to lie for this to happen. The unit simply does not pin down what was measured.
For scale: 100,000 square metres is ten hectares, roughly 1,076,000 square feet, about 24.7 acres, or about fourteen full-size international football pitches laid side by side. If you have walked a plant that size, you will remember that you did not walk all of it. That is not a criticism of the plant. Large panels need large rooms. It is only a reminder that the number describes a place rather than a capability.
There is a relationship, published since 1961 and taught in every operations management course, that links how much is in a system to how fast things come out of it. Little's Law states that work in progress equals throughput multiplied by cycle time, which rearranges to throughput equals work in progress divided by cycle time. The relationship is general: it does not depend on how the system is arranged, what it makes, or how variable the work is.
A floor area is an upper bound on work in progress. It is not throughput. Throughput is the floor divided by the number of days each order sits on it. University course notes on the same relationship make the sharper point: there is a critical level of work in progress, equal to the bottleneck rate multiplied by the raw processing time, and once actual work in progress exceeds that critical level, throughput stops rising and is pinned at the bottleneck rate. Above that line, everything extra that you add simply lengthens the cycle time.
Translated out of the mathematics and into a factory gate: past a certain point, additional floor area buys waiting rather than output. The building gets fuller, the queue gets longer, and the number of containers leaving per month does not move, because what sets it is the slowest station and not the size of the room.
| Term | In a door factory, it is | Who holds it | Is it published? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Work in progress | Everything between cut profile and packed crate, standing on the floor | The factory | Indirectly, as floor area. That is the number you were given. |
| Cycle time | Days from your approved drawing to your container being loaded | The factory, but it changes with your specification | Rarely printed. Almost always obtainable on request. |
| Bottleneck rate | The slowest station in your particular chain: coating, glazing, or assembly | The factory, and it moves when your colour batch or glass build-up changes | Almost never. This is the single most useful thing to ask for. |
| Throughput | Containers per month, at your specification | Shared, because your mix matters | Sometimes, as a headline annual figure that cannot be checked. |
Note what the table says about ownership. Of the four quantities, the one you were handed is the one the supplier holds unconditionally and the one that depends least on your project. Every quantity that actually determines your delivery date is specific to your order, which is exactly why they are not printed in a brochure: they differ per customer.
Here is a property of a door factory that no floor area can express. A panel cannot be longer than the longest bath, tunnel or hanging line it has to pass through, and those are pieces of equipment with a fixed physical length that has nothing to do with how large the building around them is.
Published examples, all from public pages: one European extrusion plant states that it anodises profile lengths up to 7.8 metres, powder coats on a vertical line up to 7.8 metres and applies thermal break to lengths up to 7.8 metres. Another North American coater describes a vertical line handling profiles from 7 metres to 8 metres. A coating line manufacturer lists a maximum profile length of 7,000 millimetres with a cure oven dwell of about twenty minutes and a conveyor speed starting at 2.5 metres per minute. A European equipment builder describes vertical lines for profiles up to 8 metres with throughputs from 200 to 1,000 profiles per hour. And the 21,000 square metre plant mentioned earlier publishes a vertical powder line for profiles up to 9,200 by 500 millimetres and an anodising plant able to treat individual bars up to 14 metres.
| Station | Publicly published length limit | What it silently caps |
|---|---|---|
| Anodising tanks | About 7.8 metres in one published European plant; up to 14 metres for single bars in another | Your tallest panel, if you want an anodised finish |
| Vertical powder coating line | 7,000 mm to 9,200 mm across published sources | Your tallest panel, for any coated finish |
| Thermal break assembly | About 7.8 metres in one published plant | Your tallest thermally broken panel, which is to say all of them |
| Sublimation or wood-effect finishing | 7,000 by 1,600 mm in one published plant | Your tallest wood-effect panel, which is a shorter limit than coating |
So the tallest door in a catalogue is, before it is anything else, a plumbing fact. It is decided by how long a tank was when it was dug and how high a conveyor was when it was hung, and no amount of surrounding floor changes it. A buyer standing in a very large building should be asking a question about a piece of equipment that is probably smaller than the room they are standing in.
If floor area were the constraint on output, the equipment industry would not be able to sell output upgrades. It can, and it advertises them in plain language. One European builder of vertical coating lines markets a scalable configuration in which a line can start at one throughput level and later be doubled to twice that level by extending the active zones and doubling the conveyor speed, with the upgrade carried out in about 48 hours and priced at a fraction of the original line. The same vendor's standard line data lists conveyor speeds from 2.5 metres per minute upward.
That product page is the cleanest available proof of the article's thesis. If a plant can double a finishing line's output over a weekend without moving a wall, then the area of the building was never what limited the output of that building.
The same logic shows up in changeover time, which is where door factories quietly lose days. Published figures for powder colour change vary widely by booth design: one distributor of coating equipment reports 5 to 15 minutes for a manual single-gun change and 15 to 30 minutes for a full automatic booth changeover, against 60 to 120 minutes with a conventional metal booth. A Chinese line builder gives 20 to 40 minutes as the traditional figure and 3 to 8 minutes for a fast-change system. Another equipment source states a typical manual change on a mid-size booth takes 25 to 45 minutes, and that the invisible costs of the stoppage, lost throughput plus wasted powder plus oven energy, are typically several times larger than the visible labour cost.
| Changeover scenario | Published time per change | What it costs at six changes a day |
|---|---|---|
| Conventional booth, published job-shop example | About 75 minutes | About 7.5 hours, which the source itself describes as nearly a full shift of non-productive time |
| Fast-change automatic booth | About 15 to 30 minutes on one published figure; under 10 minutes on another | Roughly a fifth of the conventional case, on the same floor |
| Fastest published systems | 3 to 8 minutes on one source; about 5 minutes on another | Under an hour a day. The floor did not change. |
There is an important caveat in that published material and it deserves to be repeated rather than skimmed. One equipment source states plainly that if the throughput bottleneck is the curing oven rather than the booth, a faster colour change does not actually free up throughput, and the advice is to fix the oven first. That is the bottleneck principle stated by a company that sells booths, which is the only kind of statement about bottlenecks worth believing.
For a buyer, the practical version is short. Ask which station sets the pace for a project like yours, and ask how long a colour change takes on the line that will run your colour. Two questions, two numbers, both in minutes. Neither of them appears in a square metre.
A door factory is, on most days, a place where two long flat materials wait. Glass waits. Profile waits. Both of them wait standing up, and that detail breaks the unit.
Public specifications for A-frame glass storage racks give the scale of it. A commonly listed configuration is a steel A-frame about 2,500 by 1,800 millimetres in plan with a load capacity of 3,000 to 5,000 kilograms. Another manufacturer lists a frame 1,908 by 900 millimetres in plan with a capacity of 2,000 or 5,000 kilograms and a loading thickness of 220 millimetres. A third lists an A-frame with a working load limit up to 20 tonnes, sold and used in pairs, and describes the function as holding dozens of glass packages while saving the most warehouse space.
Now put a number on it. Take the common 2,500 by 1,800 millimetre frame: it occupies about 4.5 square metres of floor. Take 4,000 kilograms as a mid-range capacity. Insulating glass at a common 6 plus 12 plus 6 build-up weighs about 30 kilograms per square metre, using the widely used workshop estimate of about 2.5 kilograms per square metre per millimetre of glass thickness, which is an industry rule of thumb and not a value we publish. Four thousand kilograms divided by thirty is about 133 square metres of glass. One hundred and thirty-three square metres of glass standing on four and a half square metres of floor is roughly thirty square metres of glass per square metre of floor.
Call it a rule of thirty. The two materials this industry is mostly made of are both stored standing up, and the number you were quoted measures the floor. Which means the figure does not even tell you how much glass the building is holding, let alone how fast glass is moving through it.
Everything above is about the building. This section is about the box, and it is where the arithmetic gets interesting, because a shipping container has two limits and a load of doors hits one of them long before the other.
A 40 foot high cube container, by widely published ISO-derived specifications, has internal dimensions of approximately 12.03 by 2.35 by 2.69 metres, an internal volume of about 76.3 cubic metres, a door opening about 2.34 by 2.58 metres, a tare weight around 3,940 kilograms, a maximum gross weight of 30,480 kilograms and therefore a maximum payload of about 26,500 kilograms. Its floor is specified to withstand a uniformly distributed load of about three tonnes per running metre, which over an internal length of roughly twelve metres comes to more than the payload can ever be, so the floor is not the limiting element.
Now take the same 30 kilograms per square metre for insulating glass. Twenty-six thousand five hundred kilograms divided by thirty is about 880 square metres of glass. The volume of 880 square metres of glass at a total build-up of about 24 millimetres is about 21 cubic metres, which is roughly 28 per cent of the 76.3 cubic metres available.
That is the whole point in one sentence. A container of doors is full by weight when it is about a quarter full by volume, so the weighbridge governs and the tape measure does not. The arithmetic above is ours, built from published container data and one stated glass rule of thumb, and you are welcome to substitute your own glass build-up and rerun it.
| Constraint | Published value | Which binds first for a load of glazed panels |
|---|---|---|
| Maximum payload | About 26,500 kilograms | This one. Reached at roughly 880 square metres of glass. |
| Internal volume | About 76.3 cubic metres | Not reached. Glass alone occupies about 21 cubic metres. |
| Internal width | About 2.35 metres | Binds on panel geometry, not quantity. See the next paragraph. |
| Floor distributed load | About three tonnes per running metre of length | Not the limit, provided the load is spread rather than concentrated. |
And now the geometry, using our own catalogue. The largest single sash we publish is 2,800 millimetres wide by 2,600 millimetres high. The inside of a 40 foot high cube is about 2.35 metres wide. Our widest published panel is wider than the container is wide. It travels leaning, on a rack, at an angle, which means the number of panels in a box is set by the angle of that rack and the spacing of its slots, and not by anything you can learn from the size of a building. The same reasoning applies to a double glass swing door, where the leaf is smaller but the glass build-up per square metre is identical and so is the weight arithmetic.
One more division, offered for scale and not as a claim about anyone's output. One hundred thousand square metres divided by roughly 880 square metres of glass per container is about 113. If the entire floor were covered in glass at container weight, it would take about 113 containers to carry it. Nobody has 113 containers on the floor. The point of the division is not the answer; it is that the answer exists, is easy to compute, and is never the number that gets printed.
Having said all of that about area, we owe you the same treatment on the numbers we do print, because a factory-size claim is not the only figure that gets read as reassurance when it is really a budget.
Take our heaviest published sliding door series. It lists a single sash maximum of 2,800 by 2,600 millimetres, which is about 7.28 square metres, and a self-balancing pulley system rated at 400 kilograms. Using the same 30 kilograms per square metre for insulating glass, the glass in that panel alone comes to about 220 kilograms before a single millimetre of frame, hardware or mesh is added. The glass has already spent more than half the rating. A load figure is not a margin; it is an allowance that your glass configuration consumes first. This arithmetic is ours, built on a stated rule of thumb, and it is the reason we will not discuss a panel size without first discussing the glass build-up.
The second thing to notice is structural, and it is a confession about how our own catalogue is laid out. We publish three load figures across the range, and they are not the same measurement: one is a pulley load capacity, one is a driving capacity, and one belongs to a different series again. Printed in a single descending column they look like a product ladder, and they are not one. A descending column of three different measurements is the first way any door catalogue gets misread, including ours.
The third is a mismatch worth stating plainly. The largest panel we publish anywhere is 2.5 by 3.0 metres. The only driving capacity we publish is on a different series. Those two rows do not form a pair, and no buyer should put them in the same column to produce a comparison, because they describe different products measured under different assumptions. If you need both numbers for one product, ask for both, in writing, for that product.
| What we publish | What it actually measures | What it does not do |
|---|---|---|
| 100,000 square metre base, two production centres | Real estate and the existence of a second plant | Say which plant cuts your profile, or how many days your order spends inside either one |
| Pulley load capacity, per sash | A rating for one moving leaf, quoted against an assumed glass configuration | Survive a change of glass. Upgrade the build-up and the rating must be re-derived. |
| Maximum single sash dimensions | A limit published against an assumed glass weight | Stay valid if you specify heavier glass, laminate or a different cavity |
| 240 hour salt spray and 5,000 newton shear | Coating and substrate corrosion resistance, and the composite bond between strip and aluminium, on one series | Transfer to any other series, or stand in for air, water or wind ratings |
| Thermal values of 1.3, 1.6 and 1.7 | System-level values for named series | Represent a whole window in your opening, or carry a certification regime you did not name |
| Sliding door range of four series | What we actually manufacture at volume | Include swing, folding or entry doors. Those category pages exist and are empty, and we would rather say so than substitute a sliding product for a glass folding doors enquiry. |
Our published base figure is stated across two production centres. That is a strength in some respects and a gap in one specific respect, and it is the gap buyers almost never close before the order is placed.
A factory-size number attaches to a company. Everything that determines how your particular doors turn out attaches to a named plant: which extrusion press feed the profile, which pretreatment tunnel cleaned it, which oven cured your colour, which bench assembled your panels, which loading bay your crate left from. Those are addresses, not brands. If you have ever tried to match a replacement panel to an existing installation years later, you already know why the distinction matters, because the thing you needed was a batch and a plant, and the thing you had was a company name.
| Item | Attaches to the brand | Attaches to a named plant | Consequence for you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Headline floor area | Yes | Partly, if disclosed | The sum tells you nothing about the part. |
| Colour batch and coating line | No | Yes | Two plants can produce two batches. One project needs one batch. |
| Profile cut length and machining | No | Yes | Tolerances are a machine property, not a catalogue property. |
| Crate, container stuffing and despatch point | No | Yes | Affects which port, which documents, and which leg of the journey is yours. |
| Replacement panel years later | Only if records survive | Only if the batch and plant were recorded | Ask for the plant name and batch number on the packing list, not in an email. |
An article that only dismantles a number is not honest either. Space buys real things, and here they are, in the order in which they usually matter to a project.
| What space buys | Why it needs room | When it is worth paying for |
|---|---|---|
| Staging a whole project so it ships as one event | Every panel for a villa or a floor plate has to exist at the same time before anything is packed | Any project where the site can only receive one delivery, or where partial delivery causes storage problems |
| One coating batch for the whole order | Colour consistency requires everything to be finished together, which means everything must wait somewhere | Any visible elevation. This is the most commonly underestimated benefit. |
| Trial assembly before packing | A large sliding assembly must be built, operated and checked, then taken apart to be crated | Multi-panel doors, lift and slide units, anything with a long track |
| Holding your glass and profile inventory | Both materials arrive in long fragile units and must be stored upright, which is a floor-area function as shown above | Projects with a defined glass build-up that can be bought early |
| A second plant when one is interrupted | Continuity requires a second address with its own lines, not a bigger single address | Programmes where a stoppage costs more than the premium |
| Room to build a full-size mock-up | A sample panel is never the size of the real opening, and the real opening is what gets argued about on site | First order from a new supplier, or any unusual span |
Notice what all six have in common. Every one of them is about holding things at the same time, not about making things faster. Space is the only input that lets a project move as one event rather than as a sequence of partial ones. That is a genuine advantage and it is worth real money on a large villa or a phased development. It is also, precisely, a statement about a stock.
If the headline area is a stock and you need a rate, the fix is not to stop asking about scale. It is to ask for three numbers instead of one, all of which any competent factory can produce from its own records, and none of which require anyone to disclose anything commercially sensitive.
| Ask for this | In what unit | Why it beats an area | A weak answer looks like |
|---|---|---|---|
| Area under roof, of which production, of which warehouse | Three square metre figures | Turns one uncheckable number into a breakdown you can reason with | One number restated with a different adjective |
| Cycle time for a project like yours | Days, from approved drawing to container loaded | This is the denominator the whole article has been looking for | A lead time quoted without saying what starts the clock |
| Longest finished length any line can take | Millimetres | Tells you the ceiling on your tallest panel, which area never will | A catalogue maximum sash size instead of an equipment limit |
| Throughput at peak and at slack | Containers per month, both figures | The gap between the two is where your delay will come from | An annual tonnage or an annual value |
| Which station sets the pace for your specification | A named process | Lets you change your specification to relieve it, which is the only real lever you have | "Everything is fully automated" |
| Named plant for this order, with address | A place, on the packing list | Converts a company claim into an address you can visit or audit | "One of our bases" |
| Where this order sits today | Weeks from today to loading | The only forecast that is specific to your order rather than to the factory | "After deposit" with no date attached |
| Do you extrude, and where | Yes or no, plus an address | Changes who controls alloy, temper and die condition, which is not a floor-area question at all | "We have our own supply chain" |
The table below is the one we would want a buyer to hold before sending an enquiry. The right-hand column is the honest part: it says why the gap exists, because in most cases the gap is not secrecy, it is that the value belongs to your project rather than to our catalogue.
| Item | Do we publish it | Why the gap exists | What to do about it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base area and number of production centres | Yes | No gap. It is a real figure and we stand behind it. | Do not treat it as capacity. Ask the three questions in the previous section. |
| Area split into production and warehouse | Not in the catalogue | It changes as lines are re-laid, so a printed figure goes stale | Ask for it dated. An undated breakdown is not worth much either. |
| Cycle time in days | Not published | It depends on your glass, your colour, your quantity and where the queue stands that week | Send your data block and ask for a number of days, not a number of weeks. |
| Longest finishing length available to us | Not published | It is equipment data, and it varies by which line and which finish | Ask per finish. Coated, anodised and wood-effect limits are not the same number. |
| In-house extrusion | Not published | Because we have not published it, and an absence is not a claim either way | Ask directly. If you need mill certificates traceable to a press, say so in the enquiry. |
| Air, water and wind ratings by series | Not published across the range | Levels are awarded to a tested configuration, and a configuration is your size and glass, not our series name | Ask for a calculation or a test at your size and build-up, naming the standard. |
| Swing, folding and entry doors | Category pages exist, product lists are empty | We do not manufacture them at present | We will say so rather than redirect you to a sliding product. Ask us for a sliding alternative and we will give you one honestly. |
| Installation | Not offered by us | Site work is local, licensed and regulated by your authority, not by a factory in Guangdong | Treat commercial swing door installation as a separate package with its own contract, and make sure someone owns the perimeter seal. |
This is the practical output of everything above. A factory can only give you a real cycle time against a real order. Send this, filled in, and the answers you get back stop being marketing. Leave a line blank and the supplier fills it with an assumption, and the assumption becomes a problem on site.
| Line | What to write | If you leave it blank |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Opening width and height in millimetres, per panel | The quote is built on a nominal size that may not be your opening |
| 2 | Wall build-up from outside to inside, layer by layer | Frame depth is chosen against a wall nobody described |
| 3 | Glass build-up, cavity, coating, gas fill, laminate | Every load rating and every panel maximum becomes provisional |
| 4 | Configuration: how many panels, which ones move, and in what order | Track count and handing get assumed, and both are hard to change later |
| 5 | Colour, finish system, and whether the whole project is one batch | Panels arrive from more than one batch and the elevation does not match |
| 6 | Threshold: level, raised, or high-ｄｒｏｐ, and why | The one decision that must be made before the floor slab, made after it instead |
| 7 | Exposure: coastal distance, industrial atmosphere, altitude, wind category | Fasteners and coating grade are chosen by default, which is the weakest way to choose them |
| 8 | Quantity, and how many of those are identical | Repetition is what lowers unit cost, and a total count hides how little of it repeats |
| 9 | Target delivery date, and what event on site depends on it | The factory optimises for its queue, not for your critical path |
| 10 | Named plant requested for this order | Your panels are made where it suits the schedule, and you find out at packing |
| 11 | Spare parts to ship in the original container, listed by item | The eighth year arrives and a roller becomes an air-freight problem |
| 12 | Who signs the perimeter seal and who is first responder for a claim | A leak becomes a correspondence course instead of a visit |
Every industry has a vocabulary of reassurance that survives precisely because it is unverifiable. Here are the ten you will encounter when you ask about a factory, and what a useless answer to each one sounds like.
| Question | An answer worth having | An answer that sounds fine and says nothing |
|---|---|---|
| How large is the factory | Three numbers: under roof, of which production, of which warehouse | One large round number |
| What is your capacity | Containers per month at peak and at slack, for a stated product mix | An annual tonnage or an annual sales value |
| How long will my order take | A number of days, with the starting event named | "Around four to six weeks" with no start, no end and no assumptions |
| What is the largest panel you can make | A millimetre limit from the finishing line, stated per finish type | A catalogue maximum with no glass build-up attached |
| Will my colour be consistent | A commitment to one batch, with the batch number recorded per panel | "We use the same powder supplier" |
| Which plant will make my order | A named address, repeated on the packing list | "One of our bases" or "our main facility" |
| Do you extrude your own profile | Yes with a plant address, or no with a named supplier and alloy documentation | "We control the whole supply chain" |
| What limits your output right now | A named station, with what would relieve it | "We are fully automated" |
| How many panels fit in a container | A number, plus the reason: weight limit, rack angle, or panel length | "We optimise loading for you" |
| Can I get a replacement panel later | Yes, against an order number, a plant name and a batch number held on file | "Spare parts are always available" |
Scale solves some problems and creates others. The honest list of situations where we would tell you to buy elsewhere, or to buy locally, is short and it is worth printing.
| Situation | Why scale does not help | What to do instead |
|---|---|---|
| One house, one opening, one replacement | The whole advantage of a factory is repetition and a single batch. A single unit uses neither. | Buy locally, with a measured opening and one responsible installer. |
| You need someone to measure, install and warrant on site | Floor area does not cross borders. Site work is a local licensed trade. | Contract installation separately and make one party the first responder. |
| Your opening dimensions are not yet frozen | A large factory schedules by batch. Late changes land in the worst possible place in the queue. | Freeze dimensions in millimetres before you request a price. |
| Your project needs a certified local approval | Approvals are issued by your authority to an applicant in your jurisdiction. No factory size confers one. | Name the scheme in the enquiry and ask what evidence the factory can supply, not what it holds. |
| You need a swing, folding or entry door | We do not manufacture them, and a large sliding door factory is not a substitute. | Ask us and we will say so. Our sliding range is on the doors page. |
| Your delivery window is shorter than one production cycle plus sea freight | Distance is a duration, and floor area does not shorten it. | Buy locally, or rephase the work so the doors are not on the critical path. |
By the standards of published claims in this industry, it sits at the top of the common band, and several suppliers publish the same figure. That is precisely the problem with using it as a comparison: when a number is shared by many suppliers and is always a round one, it is not discriminating between them. Compare the breakdown instead. Two numbers, under roof and of which production, will separate suppliers far faster than one large number ever will.
Not necessarily, and the relationship can run the other way. A large plant usually carries a longer queue, because it is built to run full. What shortens a lead time is spare capacity at the specific station your order needs, and that is a question about a schedule rather than about a building. Ask for cycle time in days, and ask what starts the clock.
Yes, and do not spend the visit looking at the size of anything. Look at four things: the longest rack or tank that your panel will have to pass through, the colour-change procedure on the line that will run your colour, the glass storage frames and how full they are, and the staging area where finished goods wait for containers. The fourth tells you more about delivery reliability than the first three combined, because a full staging area is a queue you can see.
Because output is a function of the mix. A month of standard two-panel doors in one colour and a month of oversized lift-and-slide units in four colours consume different stations in different proportions, and any single figure printed for both would be wrong for both. We would rather give you a number of days for your order than a number of containers for nobody's.
It helps with continuity, because a second plant with its own lines is genuine redundancy, and it helps with batching, because a whole project can be staged. It complicates one thing, and you should close it in writing: which plant makes your order. Ask for the address on the packing list, along with the coating batch number. Years later, if you ever need one replacement panel, those two lines are what make it orderable.
Cycle time in days, from your approved drawing to your container being loaded. It is the denominator that converts every floor area into a rate, it is specific to your order rather than to the factory, and a supplier who can produce it from records is a supplier who knows where your order will sit. If you get a number of weeks instead of days, ask what the clock starts on. That one follow-up question resolves more than any brochure.
If you are comparing suppliers, our completed work is listed under Projects, and you can reach us through the contacts page. Send the twelve-line block above and we will answer it line by line.
