Major UK expansion drive
Published:  27 January, 2014

Bosch UK officially opened its £1.2m state of the art facility in Wakefield last month. The facility is designed to provide a single northern location for Bosch combining Bosch Rexroth - its industrial drives and controls company, and Worcester, Bosch Group - its heating and hot water solutions company.

The new facility consolidates three Bosch sites in the North of England into a single location. The facility, built on a 3.6 acre site, equivalent to two football pitches, will provide customer support and service to its Bosch Rexroth mechanical engineering customers and training to its installers in the heating and hot water sector.

The Wakefield facility has been built to BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method) standards, designed to minimise energy use through thermal loss and includes a high efficiency boiler; intelligent low energy lighting systems, and motion sensor taps which reduce water consumption and waste.

As well as a 9300 ft2 training area the facility also contains a 21,150ft2 workshop; seminar rooms and office space.

Opening the new site Peter Fouquet, president of Bosch in the UK commented: “This new facility is a major investment for Bosch and represents not only our commitment to the region, but is also part of our continued drive to provide enhanced service and training to our customers. This new addition brings the total number of Bosch sites in the UK to 42. At Bosch we are truly committed to skills development of the workforce and that is why we continue to invest in the UK, especially when it comes to service and training.”

Speaking with PWE, Alastair Johnstone   managing director of Bosch Rexroth in the UK commented that the facility had  been a few years in the planning and they had been able to consolidate a number of sites into the brand new facility which was clearly attractive from a manufacturing perspective and a lot of thought had been put into the design. He said the investment of over a million pounds showed a sign of the confidence the company had in this part of the business in terms of where they saw the future going.

Bosch Rexroth who moved into the facility some time ago have about 80% of the footprint with the remaining 20% taken by the Thermal Training and Technology Centre who moved in very recently.

Johnston commented: “This is why almost a year on, we are doing the grand opening. We wanted to just do a one off we didn’t want to open 80% and then 6 months later open the other 20% it didn’t seem to work logically so we waited”.




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