Ah, the terrible persistence of the irritating jingle. It’s nearly 30 years since ‘Thousands of parts for millions of cars’ last assaulted our ears, but I’ll bet millions of middle-aged Britons, motorists or not, can render it pretty faithfully.
The company behind the jingle was a leaky lifeboat from the sinking British Leyland. It was called Unipart, and at the helm was the slight, rather diffident figure of John Neill. He had organised the management buy-out of BL’s spare-parts division, and he had a vision of a different kind of business, one where each employee was not merely a cog in a machine but, as he puts it now, ‘has the capacity to be great at whatever he is doing’. That was in 1987, and Unipart today is indeed a different kind of business, in the same way that the John Lewis Partnership or Bupa are different kinds of business. Unipart still provides thousands of parts for millions of old Leyland and Rover cars, but they contribute just 1 per cent of the group’s £1.1 billion of sales. If the company had remained dependent on Leyland’s successors, it would have gone to the scrapyard years ago.
As it is, Unipart can lay claim to be the world’s leading practitioner of the under-rated but essential art of automotive logistics. At first sight, this looks a dull business: providing spares when somebody wants them. Indeed, until Japanese carmakers started looking at the process properly, most such departments were little more than a bloke in a brown coat who knew which corner of the warehouse to go to when some obscure part was needed. But Japanese carmakers saw vast amounts of capital tied up doing nothing, and realised that the just-in-time delivery system which revolutionised car-making itself could also cut parts stock levels and waiting time.
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