growth
Tim Smith CEO, The AFE Group
revenue, so speed is essential.” “We have to stay flexible because we are servicing a very
broad range of different customers in different environments, from supermarkets and convenience stores to restaurants and five-star hotel spaces,” adds Murray. “Customers want their equipment functional and operating to specification with minimum downtime.” This might involve flexibility to provide customer-specific
TIM SMITH DISCUSSES MILLER’S VANGUARD’S APPROACH TO SPARE PARTS AND AFTER-SALES
Miller’s Vanguard is the UK’s premier service maintenance and equipment supply company within the retail industry. For over 45 years, Miller’s Vanguard has been a trusted partner to the foodservice industry, providing a wide range of essential services — from reactive and planned preventative maintenance to equipment supply and installation. At Miller’s Vanguard, spare parts and after-sales are driven by a singular priority: keeping customers trading without interruption. The approach is proactive and asset-led, aligning stockholding, supply chains and support to each customer’s specific equipment profile, operational pressures and peak trading demands. Crucially, this extends beyond service into direct parts supply, with customers such as City Facilities Management and Costa able to purchase components directly, supported by reliable availability and rapid sourcing. Rather than applying a rigid service template, Miller’s Vanguard builds flexible, tailored solutions, from dedicated site stockholding and preventative maintenance to rapid-response engineering and hybrid support models. Backed by strong supplier relationships and data-led insight, this ensures the right parts and expertise are always in place, with a model that continually adapts as customer needs evolve.
END-TO-END SOLUTIONS Miller’s Vanguard offers a truly integrated, end-to-end solution across service, maintenance and equipment supply, delivering a level of simplicity and accountability that competitors struggle to match. With specialist expertise spanning bakery, catering and full store
environments, the business combines deep sector knowledge with national scale to keep complex retail and foodservice operations running efficiently. Installation, after-sales, spare parts and lifecycle management are integrated into one seamless model, enhanced by value-added services such as equipment refurbishment, helping customers extend asset life while supporting sustainability goals and reducing waste. Supported by a highly skilled nationwide engineering network and a flexible, partnership-led approach, Miller’s Vanguard doesn’t just fix problems, it anticipates them, reducing risk, improving performance and delivering long-term, commercially and environmentally sustainable outcomes.
12 Aliworld
training for their application and to calibrate preventive maintenance plans tailored to the foodservice equipment’s use in that environment. “Unfortunately, things do go wrong in our industry,”
says Breen. “It’s all about how we react, how we get that equipment back up and running.” He highlights the importance of strategic relationships for Welbilt EMEA, including partnerships with spare parts dealers, local Factory Authorized Servicers and variously sized service companies. These partnerships enable Welbilt, as an equipment manufacturer, to remain flexible in meeting customer needs both globally and locally.
The importance of feedback To ensure services remain valuable, timely and effective, feedback is an essential part of the success cycle for all three organizations — to continuously improve and tailor services.
“Seldom do customers call you to say they’re having a
great day,” says Murray. “Most of the time when somebody calls for service support, they’re under pressure. Their operation is suffering because a piece of equipment may not be operating as they expected or has a fault. Our job is to put that right.” To efficiently manage customer requests, the C&R
Parts’ customer service team uses a ticketing system that assigns each customer a territory representative, so they have a single point of contact. “The system is open: if one assistant is absent, the
other colleagues can see the tickets of those customers and solve it quickly,” says Ziglioli. “We realized that more than 30% of tickets requesting a quotation already contained the reference codes, meaning the customer could potentially obtain a response through the spare parts web portals,” he adds. This enabled quick AI-generated responses through
rapid information extraction.
“A strong local sales and after-sales service creates a powerful value proposition,” says The AFE Group’s Tim Smith
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