The Unipart Story

The transformation of Unipart Group from part of a publicly-owned automotive company to a global logistics enterprise with a wide-range of blue chip customers is a British success story. At the heart of that transformation was the acquisition of deep knowledge and practical experience in implementing continuous improvement and engaging employees and suppliers in sustainable change.

The Unipart story is one of continual change through developing the company's capabilities and knowledge. Nowhere is this more evident than in Unipart's development from the aftermarket division of British Leyland to the fourth largest third party logistics provider in the UK.

Unipart’s early history was dogged by all the problems associated with the tainted inheritance of having been part of British Leyland. But entrepreneurial thinking from the leadership team completely changed the company's capability.

Firstly they realised that although, superficially, Unipart was in the automotive parts industry, its true core business was actually logistics – the ability to manage the entire supply chain and work in deep, trusting long-term partnerships with both customers and suppliers.

Secondly, they recognised that command and control management was obsolete. If the company was to succeed, employees needed to be given to the opportunity to learn new skills and techniques and to share that learning across organisational boundaries. In 1993, Unipart launched The Unipart U, one of the first corporate universities in Europe and the platform for change and continuous improvement across the group of companies.

The learning from The Unipart U not only defined the Group's business in a new way but also kick-started the process of creating a organisational capability that could successfully compete with other world-class operations. The key to this competitiveness came from the development of a culture, philosophy and tools that adapted the best practice from companies like Toyota and Honda. This all-embracing concept became known as the Unipart Way.

The Unipart Way is a proprietary system, developed over almost 20 years, and now widely adopted across a number of industry sectors. Unipart Group has shown it can be adapted successfully to areas far from its manufacturing birthplace in both public and private sector companies that are committed to continuous improvement.