Our global logistics relationship with Jaguar Land Rover allowed us to monitor their suppliers and their impact on the aftermarket service that Jaguar Land Rover owners were receiving.
The supplier was a major provider of bumpers to the entire UK automotive industry and they were now finding it challenging to meet the aftermarket needs of Jaguar Land Rover, as a result of the increased demand across the industry for new build cars. Resolving this through increasing their capacity, by creating a new factory, would have been a slow and very expensive solution.
Being aware of a potential problem facing both companies, we decided to take full advantage of Unipart’s engineering knowledge and set out to devise an innovative solution.
The idea was for Unipart to take over the responsibility for producing all non-current bumpers for the aftermarket. But rather than doing this within a new and separate factory, we set out to achieve this task entirely within our existing Jaguar parts distribution centre, in order to optimise the handling and stock control of these very bulky items. Drawing upon our Group’s manufacturing skills and expertise, 38 machines were received, installed and commissioned over a two week period, to allow new production to get swiftly underway.
The implementation of this innovative idea had an immediate impact on restoring service levels. It resulted in Jaguar Land Rover customer back orders of 300 different lines being reduced to zero within a month.
This very different solution, which continues today, has also delivered a 30% reduction in bumper inventory and a 50% reduction in storage space for Jaguar Land Rover.
