DIFFLOCK.com - Buyer's Guide

SERVICE AND maintenance play an impor-tant part in the marketing of all Land Rover products. Despite the fact that in the past there have been complaints about poor service and difficulty in obtaining spares and parts, the set up that now exists in the company under the control of John Lumsden should really leave no room for complaints.

In the UK the Unipart organisation is responsible for the supply of Land Rover parts and at the moment there is 93 to 95 per cent in first pick availability.

Generally speaking, servicing of Land Rover fleets is in the hands of fleet owners themselves. Those which do not comprise part of a fleet are serviced by Land Rover distributors.

And the Land Rover organisation takes the responsibility of training the service mechanics of both the fleet owners and the dealers at home and overseas.

There is a fully equipped training school at Solihull where mechanics from all over the world are trained.

Regular visits

In the UK the company s service representatives visit dealers and fleet owners on a regular basis to determine whether there are any problems arising with a particular component or a par-ticular model or whether there is any help they can give. They are also responsible for advising owners of any modification that has taken place or is advisable to carry out.

When a contractor from the UK takes a fleet of Land Rovers on an overseas contract he becomes to all intents and purposes an overseas customer and is treated as such.
Unipart visits only major markets overseas and the Land Rover service department then becomes responsible in other markets to ensure that there is an adequate supply of spare parts for owners.

Second and even third languages are essential for the senior staff of the service department to make sure they are able to converse properly in whatever market they are, not only to service their cus-tomers properly but to make sure mechanics understand their in-structions fully.

Some members of the staff find them-selves overseas on short-term contracts, others travel frequent-ly to overseas markets.

John Lum.sd.en’s private motto for his department is ‘Ser-vice Sells’ and if it is not one that has officially been adopted by the company it is one which he instills into his team.

To ensure that any defect that occurs repeatedly does not eventually become a problem for all owners, Land Rovers runs a Product Defect Report scheme. Any problem which arises repetitiously or is of high cost is automatically investigated.

Warranty statistics are also studied on a continuous basis and the cost and in-cidence of each complaint is monitored.

The resulting information is collated and referred to quality control. Some result in immediate remedial action where it is an engineering problem that can be overcome by normal corrective steps but others have to be considered at board level where a major engineering decision for example might have to be made. Some problems, of course, involve the owners in a high level of cost if they are allowed to continue and these would immediately be corrected. Others involve a high emotive element and then a subjective decision has to be taken.

The company receives more warranty claims from the home market than it does from overseas. That is probably because the overseas operator does not think it worthwhile pursuing the warranty claim.

But a repeated claim from wherever it comes causes a Problem Action Report to be raised. This indicates that Land Rover is justifying the complaint and taking remedial action. If, for example, a seal has proved to give a 10 per cent fault rate the company has to decide whether to check them all and re-order or to carry the cost of failures. In that event the decision would be to scrap the lot. Land Rover regards itself as pretty ruthless with faulty components.

Fortunately recall operations are a rarity with Land Rover but as with all automotive manufacturers the facility is there. And there is a computer program that records all modifications that are made to any vehicle, records where the vehicle is and who owns it. It will tell if a vehicle is imported with a modification from left to right hand drive and it can be used to check the owner’s reaction to the modification that has been done.

The service department is also respons-ible for techniques and methods of repair and servicing. Repair times are calculated for specific jobs and new tools are developed to make maintenance easier to perform.

And, in developing methods of service and maintenance, the department also suggest redesign of the vehicle to make servicing simpler and the removal of components easier.

The department also produces the owner’s handbooks, and the repair and maintenance manuals. And everything is in seven languages.

To encourage owners who take their Land Rovers to dealers to be serviced, the department has also had designed a range of mechanics workwear which is available in the UK but finds a more ready use in overseas markets.

Last word on the service department must come from the man responsible for running it. Says John Lumsden "People using four-by-four vehicles use them in their work and when things go wrong they need action, that’s why my motto is Service Sells’

OTHER SERIES III ARTICLES:

Technical Specifications

All of the following articleswere published between 1980 and 1983, a period that saw the introduction of the County models, the Hi-Cap Pick Up and the Stage 1 V8