As the organisation celebrates its 50th anniversary, CEO Darren Leigh explains how Unipart consistently adheres to a policy of continuous improvement
This year marks Unipart’s 50th anniversary, with the firm having been established back in 1974 as a division of the historic automotive corporation, British Leyland.
Following its launch it was, primarily, an automotive parts manufacturing business, but continued to diversify, expand and evolve over the course of the ensuing decades in a bid to stay competitive.
Today, Unipart offers a huge portfolio of solutions and performance improvement technologies covering the entire supply chain spectrum, allowing it to help thousands of customers – both big and small – to maintain efficient, resilient and sustainable operations.
The organisation can be considered an expert in seven core sectors: automotive; rail and public transport; healthcare; technology; e-commerce, consumer and retail; aerospace and defence; and industrial.
No one is better placed to explain Unipart’s approach to serving clients in these areas than Darren Leigh, who joined as CFO in 2020 before assuming the top job in 2022.
“Our mission, or, if you like, our philosophy, is to understand the real and perceived needs of our customers better than anyone else and to serve them better than anyone else,” he says.
“You may have heard of The Unipart Way, which is the manner in which we deliver that mission. We have 12,000 colleagues across the group, based in the UK and 20 international markets. Those individuals effectively demonstrate The Unipart Way every day in the way they think, work and behave to deliver the mission of serving our customers.”
A more unified approach
It’s fair to say Darren joined Unipart at a particularly challenging time for the business. It was April 2020, the pandemic was just a few weeks old and countries around the world had been plunged into lockdown.
At the time, Unipart was run more like a portfolio of individual companies than a single entity, with each offering its own discrete offering of products, services and solutions to be delivered to their unique customers.
Since taking the reins as CEO, Darren has made it his mission to move away from the divisional approach to a more united front.
“Over the last year-and-a-half especially, we’ve evolved our strategy to adopt a ‘one Unipart’ approach, offering a range of supply chain products, services and solutions to a unified customer base,” Darren explains.
“What we’ve also done is implemented a much more streamlined, collaborative approach, meaning our go-to-market strategy is much less ambiguous. So, the outside world and the marketplaces in which we operate are starting to get a much clearer view and understanding of Unipart and what we can do to help them.
“An evolution of all this is we’re developing plans to build the Unipart brand on a standalone basis – rather than the divisional approach we’ve had in the past.”
Adapting and evolving
As has been the case for businesses big and small based all over the world, Unipart has been forced to overcome its fair share of obstacles over the past few years.
Darren cites the impact of Brexit, COVID-19, the Suez Canal blockage, semiconductor supply issues and the conflict in Ukraine as the major global issues to have caused headaches, while, in the UK, ambiguity relating to the future of the rail network has had a significant impact.
“We’ve had to adapt and respond to all of these challenges,” he emphasises.
Fortunately, Unipart has a history of reinvention, with the ability to change and evolve an important part of its DNA.
“What we’ve done is evolved our own supply chain and operating model,” Darren continues. “We’re now far more integrated and collaborative across the group, rather than working in silos.
“We’ve evolved to offer a much broader, more aligned portfolio of products, services and solutions to help develop more efficient, resilient and sustainable supply chains for our customers. I’d also say we’re much leaner and financially stronger than we have been for a long time.”
The Unipart Way
Asked how Unipart has managed to enhance its operations in recent years, Darren is keen to bring the conversation back to The Unipart Way – which stays “at the heart of everything we do”.
Refined over a period of 30 years, The Unipart Way is billed as a designed system that engages every single employee within the organisation.
In addition to motivating members of the workforce, it’s aimed at equipping them with the skills to diagnose problems and create innovative solutions that will make a dramatic difference.
“The Unipart Way provides a really solid basis for continuously improving our own supply chain and that of our customers,” Darren goes on.
“We’ve also applied some continuous improvement to The Unipart Way itself, making sure it stays relevant and is reinvigorated for more complex supply chains.”
Generally speaking, Unipart considers potential new ways to evolve its own supply chain before attempting to commercialise these approaches with customers.
One such example is Eco Insight, a solution developed with the aim of providing real-time energy and carbon data across several inputs in a single dashboard. The system offers insights into how and when energy is being used and empowers firms to make well-informed decisions about their energy usage.
Darren adds: “We developed this solution to help with our own sustainability targets and we’re now offering it to our customers on a commercial basis.”
Prioritising innovation
Darren is discernibly excited about Unipart’s ability to bring innovative supply chain products, services and solutions to market – and it has a tremendous track record in doing so.
The organisation has three Centres of Excellence where it connects industry and academia in a bid to carry on developing such innovations, while also bridging the skills gap that many companies in the supply chain space and their customers are facing.
Having witnessed customers and competitors struggling with complex global supply chain issues and, in many cases, seeking to improve their resilience, Unipart has been using one of these aforementioned centres to hone its manufacturing partner strategy.
What this predominantly means is onshoring partners’ manufacturing needs by helping them to shift some of their supply back to the UK.
“Sadly, in some cases, we’ve seen companies become distressed and go out of business because of their supply chain issues,” Darren says.
“We’ve been helping customers improve their supply chains by bringing manufacturing onshore and, in some cases, taking on that manufacturing for them or taking over one of their distressed suppliers. Just last month, we completed the acquisition of a distressed supplier that manufactures components for the automotive, motorsport and aerospace sectors.”
On the topic of innovation, Darren can’t help but reference the growing influences of data, automation and AI.
Unipart is working hard to ensure automation and AI especially are at the centre of its mission to develop more efficient, resilient and sustainable supply chains for customers.
“We’ve already invested in AI in a number of areas,” Darren notes, “and we’ll continue to do that to help us develop a much more tailored range of solutions.”
Leading on safety and sustainability
Health, safety and sustainability are embedded in the way Unipart operates – and have been for several decades. In fact, you could say they form part of the DNA that makes up The Unipart Way.
From a health and safety perspective, Unipart is the most awarded UK company by the British Safety Council, with more than 70 swords of honour for safety, predominantly, but also for wellbeing and sustainability.
“Our employees’ safety and wellbeing is our number-one priority. As an organisation, we’re really proud of our world-class environmental, safety and wellbeing standards,” Darren emphasises.
Unipart’s commitment to sustainability also includes setting ambitious net-zero targets, which have been verified by the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi).
Darren continues: “Sustainable business strategies and practices are no longer a ‘nice to have’; they’re fundamental to the success of any strategy in any organisation. That’s the way we see things at Unipart.”
Boosting expertise through partnerships
Unipart has always taken a broad approach to partnership and was an early adopter of the stakeholder management approach back in the 1970s.
As an organisation, it endeavours to take a partnership approach with employees, customers, suppliers and even with the 84 communities around the world in which it operates.
When it comes to forming partnerships with other organisations, Unipart pursues these opportunities when it’s confident of achieving a “win-win situation” that will also benefit customers.
One such example is its status as an SAP Silver partner and Unipart is seeking to establish similar accreditations with other companies such as Orbus Software.
“This will allow us to continue providing the current level of support we’re giving our customers, but also gives us the expertise to deliver even better and more effective support in future,” Darren explains.
“We’ll continue to develop partnerships which benefit customers across all of our seven core sectors. They’ll become increasingly important in future as we expand our range of solutions and expertise.”
All about growth
Darren uses one word when asked to summarise what’s on the horizon for Unipart: growth.
This year alone the organisation has acquired two new businesses, which are currently being implemented into the existing portfolio of products, services and solutions offered in the marketplace.
What’s more, Unipart is consistently working on a healthy pipeline of opportunities and can boast a strong order book having already secured various contracts with customers.
“The next 12-18 months will be about continuing to delight customers and executing our growth plans,” Darren concludes. “As we’ve done this year, we’ll also continue to look for acquisitions that allow us to continue serving our customers better than anyone else.”
