Meet Allied Vehicles’ Head of Transport & Logistics, Victor Condurache. Victor is based in our Rugby transport hub and leads the Transport team in both Rugby and Glasgow as they work to make sure Allied customers receive their wheelchair accessible vehicles on time and in top condition. Read on to find out more about Victor’s role, his career before Allied, and his favorite genre of literature.
Describe your role here at Allied.
My remit is to ensure that all the vehicles that are converted get delivered to the customers on time, in good condition and, where appropriate, a demonstration is made for the customer.
That is my main remit, so, everything that comes off the production line, I eventually get. Well, 95% percent, probably, because there are some that are collected and whatnot. It’s like organized chaos!
And how long have you been at Allied?
I started on the 24th of June 2024, so still relatively new.
Before that I worked for British Car Auctions (BCA), which was my introduction to the UK automotive industry.
BCA is the largest used vehicle reseller in the UK. They collect everything from Motability vehicles, buses, etc. at the end of their lease and sell them through their auction sites. So, I was handed an account that brings in about £24 million a year, never having worked in automotive before. It was a bit of a trial by fire!
What do you enjoy most about your job?
The fact that we do something that matters. We actually do something that improves people’s lives.
Can you imagine being restricted to one place because you can’t go anywhere? Giving mobility to somebody who isn’t mobile, it’s really cool. It’s a huge thing. It’s incredible to me how many people in need there are, and we get to help them.
You joked that your job is organized chaos. Tell me about some of the challenges that come with that.
Well, we’re the last stage the product lifecycle before it reaches the customer, so delays that happen anywhere else in the process can have a knock-on effect on lots of other departments.
A vehicle moves along each stage of the production line, then it goes to get inspected. Then it gets valeted, then it comes to my team, and depending on where the vehicle destination is, it’s either going to come to Rugby so that we can deliver it from there, or it goes from Glasgow.
It doesn’t happen often but when we do have a delay anywhere in that process, deliveries can’t happen or get delayed themselves, and the customer is being let down to some extent. So, that is the biggest challenge; to have everything done on time, to a good standard.
What’s your impression of the company culture here at Allied?
Very tight knit. I feel like I can go and talk to anybody about anything and it’s a very open-door policy, especially with senior management.
The biggest difference from BCA, which is a giant in the industry, is that for BCA everybody’s a number. Here, everybody has a name; it feels very family orientated.
I actually don’t feel like it’s really work here, you know; it feels like more of a collaboration between like-minded people.
Do you have a memory of your time at Allied so far where you think “that was a good day.”
Haha! A good day is any day with very few issues!
I guess a really good day was when we moved to the new site in Rugby. After we bought the new building we had it refurbished, so up to the beginning of September we were working from a temporary office/room.
When we moved to the permanent office, that was a good day because we felt, “that’s it. This is our place. This is where we are and where we’ll stay,” and it was a good feeling.
And your work is based in Rugby, but personally you’ve come to us from Romania?
Yes! From the eastern part, a city called Iași near the border with Moldova. I arrived here in February 2015, and my wife followed in April, so we’ve been here almost 10 years.
We had nothing set up when we moved here, so I said, “let me go there first, see if I survive, and then you come along after.”
Did you go straight to Coventry when you arrived in the UK?
No, when we first arrived we spent four years in London. Then we both moved to Coventry because my wife got a job in probation services there, and that’s when I got the BCA job. So, we’re here to stay! We bought a house and everything; no going back now!
Where do you see Allied headed in the next couple of years?
It’s just going to grow. As you know we have acquired Sirus Automotive recently; that in itself is proof of growth, and the only direction the company will go is up. We will start focusing a lot more on international as well; we’re already in Spain so we have two active markets where we can grow.
Explain the difference in the process of transporting a vehicle from the UK to Spain.
The biggest difference is the left-hand drive. The transport is not like it is here, planning one day to the next, it’s usually planning from one week to the next.
Then we have the customs documents that we need to fill out, and depending on the route we deliver, if we go to Spain, we might go through three countries, because some routes go through Andorra, which is a tiny little country between Spain and France.
It’s quite a journey and we are hoping to streamline it, but that’s in the future.
If there was just one thing that you could tell people about coming to work for Allied, what would you want to tell them?
If they’re coming from a corporate environment, I would tell them, “Forget everything you knew.” That’s what I would tell them, because it’s nothing like the corporate world here.
Do you have any sort of goal or objective that you’re working towards just now? Either personal or professional?
I want to make everything in transport transparent to every other department in the business. I don’t want transport to ever be the bottleneck of the business.
I want to offer the business the flexibility where if we were to open a new production line tomorrow, we would be able to deliver everything that comes off that line without delays and major incidents.
It’s a plan that I have that I have started to put in motion, but It’s not something that can be done overnight, of course, but I have a great team; my guys are good. They’re amazing, actually. I couldn’t do this without them, so let me say “thank you, guys.”
I’ve been very lucky, actually, to have such good people working under me since I started. Especially here in Glasgow, because I’m based in Rugby, and I only come up here two days every couple of weeks. If they weren’t good, that would have been a problem. So, thank God for Jamielee and the team.
How do you like to unwind?
Sleep in! That’s the first thing I do on a day off. When I wake up, I usually I take an hour to have my coffee, because I read a lot and just sometimes forget about the coffee.
Also barbecuing. Diarmid McBride, our Director of People & Compliance, was down in Rugby shortly after I started, and I cooked a Tomahawk steak for him.
[“It was excellent too, a solid 9 out of 10!” ~ Diarmid]
What are you reading at the moment? Is there anything you would recommend?
I‘m reading The Decendants War by John Walker just now; it’s a nine-book series. I’m very genre focused. I enjoy sci fi books and usually go for a series instead of short stories.
My favorite book is Ender’s Game by Orson Scott-Card, together with Shogun by James Clavell. Those are my two favourite books.
What’s something that not many people know about you?
Probably that; that I like sci-fi. I think nobody knows that outside my close circle of friends. So, there you go. I am a sci-fi geek and proud.
If you hadn’t ended up in Transport and Logistics, is there another career that you think you might have pursued?
Programming, I.T., probably Data Analysis. I have some experience in I.T., and I dabble with a bit of Python programming, but nothing major.
I had a few months where I strongly considered it and if this opportunity at Allied hadn’t come along, I would probably be pursuing that.
