Head Office Departments
Click on one of the following links to go directly to one of our departments.
Buying
Buying sits at the commercial heart of Screwfix. We're responsible for the whole product cycle, ensuring that the products we stock really match our customers needs, as well as delivering on sales, margin and profitability measures.
As a team, we source and select every product that we sell via all of our sales channels, create product promotions, manage relationships with our suppliers and directly source products from around the world – many of which are selling as our own exclusive brands.
With our market share increasing dramatically – we've doubled the size of our ranges in two years – we're one of the UK's most successful commercial teams in our category. Our people are typically high calibre, commercially driven, confident negotiators with a real eye for exciting and innovative new products. With the ability to influence and strike profitable deals, they operate quickly and decisively with a really positive approach to business.
Back to top of page.Marketing
As you'd expect with our no-nonsense brand, the people in our marketing department are seasoned commercial operators, handling Screwfix's commercial relationship with customers and deciding how we present our products, our catalogue, our Trade Counters and overall customer proposition. Everything the customer sees, the entire look and feel of the Screwfix shopping experience, is largely down to the influence of this department.
We promote significant offers across our three core sales channels of mail order, our website and our ever-growing network of Trade Counters. We help to maximise sales by ensuring that all of these areas are presented to the customer in the most dynamic, cutting-edge and advanced way possible, forever adapting to ensure we remain at the forefront of our industry.
Managing brand consistency, spend and volume throughout such a rapidly expanding business means new challenges daily, and the hardworking team bring all their multi-channel experience to bear as experts in balancing commercial and customer needs. Made up of several smaller departments including Trade Counter marketing, Contact Centre marketing, e-commerce and web marketing, direct marketing, PR and catalogue production among them, this is a large and skilful multi-disciplinary team containing people with a wide range of skills right across the marketing spectrum.
Back to top of page.Supply Chain
The Supply Chain team is responsible for ensuring that all our 18,000 product lines are available for our customers whenever they want them and through whatever sales channel they choose.
We manage the entire end-to-end process of bringing goods from our suppliers to our distribution centres, then onto our Trade Counters or directly out to our customers. It's a hugely complex process and one that takes highly skilled and committed people to manage successfully.
Whether based in planning & forecasting, store replenishment or supply chain development, our people play an important part towards the success of Screwfix. We also have the challenge of accommodating the enormous growth that we are experiencing and we need to ensure that our infrastructure is ahead of the game. Both doers and thinkers, we work hard and adapt quickly to an aggressive development agenda. We're very results-focused, and our tough commercial edge gives us a clear view of the big picture that's getting bigger by the week.
Back to top of page.Commercial Planning & Support
This recently formed department provides vital support to the commercial areas of Buying, Marketing and Supply Chain. Working closely with these functions, the commercial planning side of the team undertake a wide and diverse range of tasks, including detailed research into potential new suppliers, product ranges, brands and promotions, identifying gaps in the market and developing long-term strategies on how to exploit them. We develop ranges, provide insight into how to promote and market these new lines, negotiate catalogue space for them, and understand how best to source and supply them.
The commercial support element of this function provides vital administrative support to these areas, managing tasks such as checking that prices, product specifications and photographs are correct on the website and in the catalogue. We take the detail work away from the commercial profit generators in these departments and apply our expertise to ensure that data is accurately and properly recorded and available for use by the business.
Back to top of page.Commercial Finance
Commercial Finance exists to shape how Screwfix makes money. The team here analyses the financial performance of all areas of the business, evaluating how successful each profit centre, initiative and project has been. We use this analytical data to report on outcomes and to inform the business decisions we take as a company every day, from whether to open a new Trade Counter format to whether we can sell a particular range of products and make a profit. We deliver strong, informed opinions on the financial viability of a whole range of business propositions and use the facts to determine what opportunities are likely to be successful.
Those people who are successful in this department tend to be full of curiosity and application. We think of ourselves as strong problem solvers, able to work well with sometimes varying information to bring about process improvements and resolve often complex commercial profitability issues. We're also skilled at talking comfortably with non-financial managers, and quick to gain credibility through expert knowledge and support. We influence decision making at the very heart of the business, and our people are as comfortable presenting to the board as they are analysing complex data and figures.
Back to top of page.Operational Finance
Operational Finance keeps a tight control of the finances of an exceptionally fast growing business. We are the team that manages all of Screwfix's accounting, financial transactions, treasury activities and financial reporting.
A continuously evolving department, we embrace change and adaptation, constantly reviewing and streamlining processes, innovating and improving all the time. For example, supplier invoices have more than trebled in recent years, yet our payables team has stayed virtually the same size, simply embracing new tools to increase productivity.
Commercially aware, we partake in high-level decision-making and influencing, viewing challenging situations as opportunities rather than problems, and resolving them in ways that might defeat more conservative thinkers. Rather than number crunching behind closed doors, we're very 'heads-up', working closely with colleagues across the business to move Screwfix forward.
Back to top of page.Human Resources
Human Resources is responsible for bringing in good people, managing them well and developing them for the future - an exciting challenge in a business that's doubled its staff in just two years and will continue to increase numbers as the business expands further. Inspired by continual improvement, we're constantly introducing new processes as experts in reward, communications, employee relations, organisational structure and change.
We ensure that people of the highest standard are selected and recruited by using the most up-to-date tools possible, then put them through a structured and intensive training programme to ensure that every member of staff is equipped with the skills and knowledge to do their job to the best of their ability. Our fast-track schemes, high-potential programmes and extensive feedback and engagement tools ensure that people are kept close to the business and highly motivated as their career with us develops.
We make sure that people are well rewarded and supported, kept up-to-date and treated fairly, ethically and respectfully. This is Human Resources at its most proactive, driving the processes behind the major success story that is Screwfix.
Back to top of page.Business Change
Essentially the visionary and strategic business side of IT, Business Change looks at the rationales, benefits and impacts involved in implementing new infrastructure, systems and processes across the business, especially with the incredible expansion of our Trade Counters operations.
Our rapidly expanding team contains a wide range of solution-focused IT professionals of all types, using the latest and most innovative project management techniques to deliver high value strategic initiatives that shape the entire way the company goes about our business. If we need to spend millions reconfiguring our entire Trade Counter technology infrastructure to cope with the demands made by our phenomenal growth, ours is the department who figures out how to do it and makes it happen.
Typically we work at a very fast pace on key business projects, several at a time, as part of a journey designed to take Screwfix from a medium sized organisation to a fully-fledged corporate. It's an exciting time to be driving this change as we're both empowered and well resourced to play a major role in all the differences still to be made.
Back to top of page.IT
Dealing with phenomenal growth and an ambitious Trade Counter roll-out programme, our IT department is extremely lively, challenging and exciting in the way it operates and supports the IT infrastructure so crucial to all Screwfix operations.
This is IT right at the dynamic end of one of the UK's fastest moving retail sectors. Our highly technical team are responsible for ensuring that all the systems in the business, both in the Head Office and out in the Trade Counters, remain fully functional and in prime working condition. We investigate issues, solve problems, and keep the whole technology infrastructure running smoothly.
Always passionate about technology and able to own and resolve technical issues quickly and effectively, our environment is well suited to the kind of inquisitive and hardworking IT professionals who enjoy meeting new challenges every day, and can't bear staying still for too long.
Back to top of page.Business Services
This department is responsible for managing many of our largest corporate accounts, ranging from major building, electrical and plumbing contractors to maintenance companies and large corporate bodies.
By engaging regularly with key decision makers and buyers, we understand our customers inside out and are able to respond to their ever changing needs by helping them to understand the best products for their needs, informing them about promotions, solving their queries and generally ensuring that they are happy and content with Screwfix as a major supplier.
We also develop new business customers by proactively reaching out to the market, speaking to companies and organisations who could benefit from using Screwfix but aren't currently a customer. We help them to understand why we're the very best around, without giving them the hard sell, and introduce them to the great product ranges and fantastic deals we have to offer.
Our people are outgoing, friendly and engaging individuals who love nothing more than talking to our corporate account customers and delivering them a great service. Sales led and service focused, always on the look out for an opportunity and forever striving to fulfill the requirements of the customer, we are a dynamic and commercially focused department which is a great place to work.
Back to top of page.Trade Counter Projects
Trade Counter Projects makes the impossible possible. We find sites for, purchase, construct, fit out, stock and launch for all of our new Trade Counter outlets.
We do this at a phenomenal rate - often several stores a week, every week of the year, all within fourteen weeks of finding the site. Not only that, but we continuously refurbish, adapt and freshen up our existing stores to make them the very best places for our customers to shop. Remarkable by any retail standards.
Our people put in 100% all the time, offering delivery, ownership, ideas, flexibility, hard work, commitment – and our expectations are extraordinarily high. We live on the edge, take big risks and never say 'no can do'. We take a commercial view, balance the risks and go for it - fast.
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