To keep pace with its phenomenal growth in sales of machines in recent years, Goscor Lift Truck Company (GLTC) has implemented far-reaching changes to its parts department. This is according to GLTC MD Darryl Shafto.

“We recently took some time to analyse our parts business and found areas in which we could improve our service. Some areas, like pricing and parts stock levels, required fundamental changes but we are more than happy to implement them as we know they will be of real benefit to our customers.

“We know how important our genuine parts are to our customers and we realised we needed to make improvements to make it easier for our customers to purchase from us. These improvements not only included stock and pricing changes, but also changes to the way we were doing business.

”We pride ourselves on machines and support services that give our customers one of the lowest total costs of ownership in the industry and our parts supply is an important aspect of that equation. To be able to source genuine parts quickly, wherever you may be in the country at reasonable prices is critical to all-round efficiency for our customers , which includes, obviously, the minimising of downtime to the greatest extent,” Shafto said. 

He added that the value of parts in stock has increased by more than 200% to about R8 million and that prices have come down by an average of approximately 15%.

GLTC national parts manager Strini Naidoo says he is excited about the revamp. “The entire team is very motivated by this opportunity to improve the service to our customers and we plan to be much more proactive in selling our services in the future,” he says.

He adds that part of this proactive approach will be a ‘mobile parts and service’ initiative where specialised vehicles will be able to deliver parts (and service) 24/7 to maintenance contract customers only. “From a parts perspective, this will make a palpable difference to our customers whose primary requirement is to have the right parts delivered as quickly as possible when needed,” says Naidoo.

Shafto says that the proactive mind-set is crucial to the future of the GLTC parts division. “It’s all very well having the right prices and right stock, but, in this highly competitive environment no parts division can sit back in the hope that the business will grow. We will be getting out there and aggressively selling the benefits of using our services and I have no doubt that this will be of significant benefit to both our customers and ourselves,” he concluded.

Since 1984 Goscor Lift Truck Company (GLTC), part of Imperial’s Goscor Group, has, offered world class equipment and solutions in the warehouse materials handling industry. GLTC is the sole distributor in South Africa of some of the most world’s most famous brands including: Crown, Doosan, Bendi and Hubtex. GLTC is part of the Goscor Group – now part of Imperial- which has been supplying the local market with state-of-the-art industrial equipment and world-class solutions for the past 29years. It consists of 9 key divisions, and is an exclusive distributor of leading and world-class brands of industrial equipment.