Mercia Park revs up performance for JLR in 2024

Mercia Park is the Global Parts Logistics Centre for our customer Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) within the automotive sector.

As JLR’s supply chain improvement partner, Unipart provide services and solutions to JLR across our seven capabilities, with this site mainly delivering Planning and Supply Chain Management capabilities (such as customer service) and a range of and Logistics and Transportation capabilities.

The 2.3million sqm site was purpose built to consolidate over 10 separate sites into a single, optimised operation for all of JLR’s aftermarket parts logistics operations. This will enable single processes for both the Land Rover and Jaguar brands, ultimately driving greater efficiencies and a consistently high service level to all JLR customers.

Steve Clarke, Mercia Park Operations Director, explains how the team on site have transformed the operation during 2024 to achieve a major milestone for JLR and deliver on our customer promise.

“The Unipart Way is at the heart of everything we do at Mercia, which is reflected in the team’s high performance. They have worked tirelessly to deliver incredible improvements in service and quality and a smooth supplier transition for the customer.

Improving operational excellence

Some of the great results we have achieved through the way we work this year include:

• Reducing our Outbound work in progress (WIP) from 1.5m to under 300k, and Aged from 817k to 17k through improvement management and control and working closely with JLR.
• Improving the quality of what we send out to more customers so they get the parts they are expecting “right first time”- reducing the % of errors from 2% to 0.2%
• Continually increasing the number of pieces received in a week, with a record of 1.84 million pieces during the summer!

Welcoming new colleagues

Throughout 2024 we welcomed and inducted 548 colleagues who transferred from one of the previous Land Rover sites in Desford. Their dedication and hard work has been instrumental in the turnaround and success of the operation.

Land Rover Transition

The team have worked tirelessly to transition Land Rover parts from six different sites into Mercia Park in over 10,000 loads.

The final milestone load arrived in November meaning that Mercia Park now has all the parts for all Land Rover vehicles under one roof!

In 2025 we will now work closely with the experienced teams at Unipart’s Honeybourne and Baginton sites to ensure a smooth transition of the 8 million Jaguar parts into Mercia Park in a further 1400 loads.

One year on

It’s hard to overstate the complexity of just what has been achieved at Mercia, and these remarkable achievements are testament to the power of teamwork and a culture of continuous improvement.

As I reached my first anniversary in my role, my overwhelming feeling was (and still is) gratitude for the dedication, commitment and contribution to the progress that the site has made to support JLR globally.

With a team of 1800 colleagues, embedding The Unipart Way as the way we think, work and behave has been paramount, and I’m delighted that we have been able to establish a strong colleague Forum who have focused on making Mercia a place where everyone feels valued and listened to, reflected in our strong Employee Engagement survey results last year.

Everyone should be proud of what they have been part of and I am confident and excited about the next 12 months as we continue to build upon our strong foundations and momentum to establish Mercia as the industry leader in the Automotive aftermarket sector"

You can watch the video below that was shared with colleagues at Mercia's last site town hall briefings to celebrate all that has been achieved on the site during 2024.