Supporting HR teams

The Parts Alliance, a subsidiary of Uni-Select, is one of the UK’s leading suppliers of automotive parts to independent automotive businesses and employs 3,000 staff across the UK. Jo Warren is their HR Director.

“When we met myHRdept in 2015 our needs were fairly simple – I was spending a lot of money on employment lawyers to handle routine employment issues and I felt myHRdept would be a cost effective solution – they were, but my goodness things have moved on since then!”

At the time of our engagement with the Parts Alliance the group numbered less than a thousand people, but through a rapid series of acquisitions quickly grew to 2,500 and beyond. Jo’s HR team had their hands full and it quickly became apparent that there was a wider role for myHRdept in supporting their team, not just with ER and employment legal issues, but across the whole spectrum.

“Sometimes my team are just too stretched, or we’ve run out of people to hear later stage processes or we simply don’t have HR resource in the right location – it’s great to be able to call on myHRdept to help out, their response times are good and their advice is pragmatic and robust – we trust them with some of our most sensitive and challenging issues and they’re happy to jump in a car and carry out work (and training) in our sites too.”

The Parts Alliance presented a different opportunity to our standard model of supporting smaller business.  HR teams in mid-size and larger employers often need overflow support, or support with sensitive issues. With our extensive employee relations and employment law pedigree and an experienced team of 10 HR staff (including ex lawyers) myHRdept are well placed to help and, as a bonus, we’re much more cost effective and have much wider and deeper hands on industry experience than law firms can offer. We were able to win the confidence of the Part’s Alliance team and now have a long running relationship. 

“As HR Director it’s a great comfort to me that I have access to a really experienced sounding board, and I meet with Bill (myHRdept Director and a former HRD for Coca-Cola’s UK operations) at least a couple of times of year to confidentially discuss our HR agenda.  Over the years myHRdept have won the confidence of my fellow directors and managers too…this has turned into a long term relationship covering many aspects of our people related activities at all levels in the business.”

Our thanks to Jo Warren for her kind permission to use this case study. 

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