PARTS
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As sales grow, so does the portfolio for parts. In an ultra-competitive sector, it is vital for the vehicle supplier to have a major share of the parts business that comes off the back of servicing and repair and maintenance.
“The parts holding and availability have steadily improved over the last two years,” says Keith Child. “Isuzu Motors Europe opened a new purpose-built parts distribution centre in Antwerp in 2009. Since then, we have balanced the stock levels and depth of holding at our UK distribution centre (run by Multipart) in order to improve availability from both locations.” By getting both sites to work in tandem, duplication is avoided and availability and efficiency improved. Isuzu Truck (UK) currently provides 97.5% availability on an overnight VOR and three-day stock order basis.
“We have also strengthened our dealer parts network development team. We’ve employed three experts who work with our dealers to develop parts sales initiatives and campaigns,” he says.
“This ensures that we are competitively priced and have the right volumes of parts availability within the marketplace. We are absolutely committed to ensuring that our customers are supplied with competitively priced genuine Isuzu parts.” Child realises Isuzu has to supply parts at competitive prices so that it doesn’t drive customers into buying cheap, copy parts of poorer quality that might put the safety (and potentially the warranty) at risk.
“There are many OEM parts of good matching quality that customers are, of course, at liberty to use, but they must be careful. Worryingly, there are also inferior quality parts that are portrayed and marketed to be the real thing,” he warns.