We take a short hop from our Glasgow Head office across the motorway to Edinburgh, to visit the small but mighty team in our Allied Parts Hub. We sat down with Department Manager Stephen Dick to get to know the team and learn about what they do.
Mission and Purpose
We’re the parts hub for Edinburgh, the Lothians and Fife. We cover the area from Fauldhouse all the way down to Dunbar and as far north as Falkirk. We’re hoping to expand into the Fife area and try and create more business in there.
It’s mostly Stellantis parts that we supply, and we also do Ford. We do a lot of oils as well, like Mannol Oil; we’re the distributor for Scotland for that.
Team Members
There’s me – Stephen Dick – I’m the Department Manager. We have Laura Wood and Robbie Carriere, who are Parts Persons. There’s Phil Man, who’s a Call Handler. John McKee and Billy Tudhope are our Drivers, and John Cumming is our Business Development Manager.
We all have a good relationship and good banter in the office. You have to when it’s such a small team like this. You get to know each other. Robbie, he’s very family focussed with his two young kids, and Laura’s our resident daredevil – she’s into skydiving and cold-water swimming and stuff like that – Phil likes to get out on his mountain bike when he can, and he loves to cook.
Day-to-Day
Our day starts early, around half past six, when the van driver from Glasgow arrives with our first delivery. We get the parts unloaded, checked off and get the invoices done.
Then we get the parts organised to their various van runs for the day, making sure the correct part is going to the correct place with the correct paperwork, and the drivers leave at 9am to get them distributed.
The team arrive in the morning from 8:30am, taking calls from customers and trade, and picking parts, and then around midday our second delivery of the day arrives from Glasgow, and we do the same again.
Notable Achievements
John won an internal Allied award, called ‘Living the Values’ recently. He’s a great member of the team and thoroughly deserved to win it.
There was a day when a whole batch of parts came in without paperwork and John just didn’t let it get in the way. He took the extra time and wrote down every part number so we could get the parts booked out and deliveries sent to our customers on time.
It was a pretty laborious job, having to do that all manually, but he just got stuck in and did what needed to be done.
Challenges and Solutions
Our biggest challenge is when parts are on back-order with the manufacturer, because our customer sees that as an Allied issue, when it’s really a supplier issue.
But, we work closely with Parts Admin in Glasgow who get all the updates from the suppliers and the ETA from their factories, and we pass that on to the customer.
It has a knock-on effect, because if, for example, Stellantis can’t supply us with a part, we can’t supply that part to a garage, so that garage can’t fix their customer’s vehicle, and their customer might need to hire a vehicle or make other arrangements. So, it’s important for us to keep up to date and pass that info down the line.
The frustration is that we have no control over it – we’re on the suppliers’ timetable and if they change the delivery dates, there’s nothing we can do; we just have to apologise to the customer and explain what’s happening.
If it’s a Stellantis part we can check other parts hubs through their system and sometimes source it from somewhere else in the UK, and that gets things moving and ultimately gets people back on the road.
Why It Matters
The Parts Team is a crucial cog in the machine. If we weren’t here vehicles wouldn’t get fixed.
You can have the greatest technicians and mechanics in the world but without Parts People, and their knowledge of what they’re buying in for you, nothing would get done, the service department wouldn’t hit their targets, our trade customers wouldn’t get anything done… so I think Parts definitely deserves a wee bit of recognition.
How Can People Get in Touch with Edinburgh Parts?
If you have an enquiry, you can give us a call on 0131 443 9995, or you can email us at parts.ed@alliedvehicles.co.uk and one of the team will be happy to help.
