Learning centre with Neill drive

Unipart University is a multi-million-pound complex of state-of-the-art lecture halls and computerised learning centres in the heart of the Unipart group's headquarters building at Cowley, near Oxford.

It was conceived by John Neill, Unipart's chief executive of around two decades, as a learning centre and forum in which not just Unipart's employees - 10,000 at the latest count, making Unipart the largest single employer in Oxfordshire - but other business, government and even academic audiences might learn of the lean enterprise culture on which its business practices have been based. These have now become embodied in a corporate slogan, "the Unipart Way".

Its lengthy list of high-profile attendees has included prime ministers John Major and Tony Blair and a whole gaggle of ministers from Tory and Labour administrations.

Appropriately, Unipart University's founding chancellor, albeit part-time, was Dan Jones, the motor industry professor who co-authored the definitive work on lean production, 'The machine that changed the world'.

Like Unipart itself, the in-house university has grown and diversified enormously since it was founded in 1993 as probably the first UK 'corporate university'.

Once merely the parts and accessories division of formerly UK state-owned vehicles group British Leyland, Unipart has evolved since its 1987 privatisation into a complex and varied business.

Apart from its automotive connections, it also embraces logistics, distribution and manufacturing across a wide array of sectors - rail and health services included.

Mr Neill's enthusiasm for the 'UU' was, and remains, boundless. His own time spent lecturing has ranged up to nine hours a week.

He is one of British industry's most energetic and articulate tub-thumpers in advocacy of the need of British industry and financial institutions to eschew short-termism driven by the markets, and to close still-wide quality and productivity gaps with best-practice nations. Indeed, he could be described as putting his money where his mouth is.

With a large personal shareholding in Unipart from its 1987 institutions and management-led buy-in, Mr Neill could long ago have floated Unipart and probably have cashed in handsomely.

Instead, he maintains that the current ownership by employees, directors and long-term institutional backers is essential for Unipart to maximise its long-term potential, devoid of market pressures - and that the 'U' has a core role to play in that process.

As executives readily acknowledge, setting it up in 1993, at an initial cost of £1m, was born out of urgent corporate need, not management whim.

"We had to become much more competitive and this seemed the best way to go about it," says Frank Nigriello, corporate affairs chief.

Unipart's automotive relationships with Japanese customers, such as Honda and Toyota, had driven home to the company how far much of UK and even German industry was adrift of the world-class Japanese in terms of quality and productivity.

What executives and employees of the various Unipart divisions in direct working relationships with the Japanese could learn of their best practices was to be packaged into lectures and courses, for dissemination to employees throughout the group.

What was important to each business, says Mr Nigriello, became the university's courses. And each business division became a university 'faculty' in itself.

Along the way, as part of a continuous updating process, courses have expanded to take in presentation, negotiating and leadership skills for in-house audiences.

For attendees from hundreds of supplier companies, other lectures have set out Unipart's requirements for continuous cost-down, quality-up and related improvements, with frameworks for how to achieve them. The facility has evolved in three distinct phases.

Initially, the emphasis was on courses taught during a morning being put into practice by the workforce in the afternoon.

Then followed a complementary computer network-driven "virtual" university, with courses available also online, and cutting the learn-to-use time to as little as an hour.

The "virtual" university has since been extended into the very heart of Unipart's workplaces via its so-called "faculty on the shopfloor" - computer learning and information retrieval centres often built adjacent to assembly lines.

Using them, an employee encountering a problem in, for example, petrol tank manufacturing, can instantly interrogate the university's knowledge storehouse for possibly relevant solutions from elsewhere in the business.

Employees are encouraged to be adventurous in their relationships with the 'U'. "People need to be allowed to make mistakes. It is an environment where people can experiment and take a little risk," says Mr Nigriello.

Facilities within the complex are endowed with catchy titles: the library is 'The Learning Curve'; the computer centre is 'The Leading Edge'.

Every employee of the group is able to borrow laptop computers in pursuit of IT literacy in every aspect of the group's business.

"IT training is a big element of what we do and we have been taking fear out of the computer to the extent that most people are now computer-literate," says Mr Nigriello.

The U acts also as a facilitator for the work of Unipart's equivalent of quality circles - "our Contribution Counts" teams, whose work has been disseminated through the group with resulting cost-savings estimated at £2.5m a year.

Most recently has come what Mr Neill calls the "stakeholder" phase, with the faculties opened to outside companies interested in tapping into the university's learning expertise.

"If it works for us, it can be made to work for other companies," says Mr Nigriello. Indeed, Unipart now has a commercial consultancy operation, Unipart Advanced Learning Systems, which, for the past two years, has been imparting its knowledge systems to companies in the region.

Mr Neill says that, while many corporate 'universities' are merely training centres, Unipart's "is at the very heart of the business" and a key enabler for future growth of the business."

He runs his own monthly course on the philosophy and principles of Unipart's approach to business.