Catching up...

I'm sorry I haven't been able to post this past week, or so. I won't make excuses except to say I have been very busy. Soooooo, hang in there with me. I should be back posting by the weekend. Thanks for your patience. 

"I Hope My Judgements Have Been Vindicated..." Part 3

Willie Mac: Let’s talk about taking a bike from concept to showroom.

Warburton: Starting backwards there is not much you can do in less than two years. Normally, it would be three to four years. A new bike from scratch four years. Update to an existing bike may be two, two and a half years. You might get it down under two years, but not by much, because even if you have a relatively small project when you start messing around, you may have to develop a new tool, for instance. That takes up time which cannot be collapsed.

Willie Mac: Talk to me about starting a project.

Warburton: There are a few different ways to start a project. You can recognize you have a bike that needs an update. You need to figure out what needs to be done to the bike and me putting a list together of things we could improve. That’s based on feedback from customers that have actually had a chance to ride it. Feedback from the press. Feedback from our own engineers.

A bit more difficult is when you have an empty hole to fill with no bike. It takes a bit more head scratching. It comes down to a piece of paper. A list of attributes.

Willie Mac: How do you know you have a hole if nothing is there?

Warburton: I guess that comes from the world around you. There’s lots of this kind of bike and we don’t have anything to compete. More rarely you might think “there’s a good kind of bike that we could do.” Just from your experience in motorcycles. Once you start pushing them into boxes you can categorize them and figure out where you don’t have one.

Willie Mac: How is the decision reached to actually move ahead with the idea?

Warburton: There is a few months work on feasibility, the likely impact on the business. See how many engineers we’re going to need and for how long. How much money it’s going to cost to get it together. How many we can expect to sell. How much we’ll make on each one. An economic case for the bike. How it fits with Triumph. How it fits alongside other bikes in the range. This is what it would be like. This is how hard it would be to do. Present all that data to what we call the stakeholders, which is the boss, of course, Mr. Bloor.

Everything goes past him first. Then to our CEO and various of the sectional managers in the company. To be honest, once John (Bloor) says we’re doing it, and then it is more of a case of letting everyone else know what we’re doing. We have a lot of projects going on simultaneously, so the whole thing has to be doable with the people we’ve got.

Willie Mac: How about marketing research?

Warburton: We don’t do as much marketing research as those outside the industry assume. We certainly do when we are approaching a project we haven’t done before. We need to understand it properly. And, we do some research when updating bikes as well. Not in every country we operate in. Frankly, the US is one of the more difficult countries in which to do research because you are so big and spread out. It is difficult to find people to talk to. But, when you do find them, especially with motorcycles, they are most happy to talk to you.

Feedback is very difficult to quantify. We get negative feedback from or dealers every month. The US has a very organized system in that the area managers – about nine of them – get to all the dealerships in their area and get comments back from the dealers in their area including about our bikes. Suggestions for improvements on the new bikes, comments on the existing ones. That all comes back to me. I often find, that if we are doing our job properly we have already picked up on the stuff. We understand our own motorcycles well enough to know what we need to do on them. Sometimes you get a “well, that’s a good idea.”

Willie Mac: How many motorcycles does Triumph have under development at any one time?

Warburton: If you will hold on for just one moment I will count them up and tell you (computer keyboard clicking in background). One, two, three…fourteen…twenty-seven, twenty-eight under development. Some of them we’re just getting kicked off on. Some of these are relatively minor updates.

Willie Mac: You folks are busy.

Warburton: We’re very busy. We get a lot of requests from people saying why don’t you do this? Why don’t you do that? The answer is often yes, that would make a nice bike, but we can’t do all the bikes we would like to do. We have to prioritize.

Willie Mac: Is there anything I should know that I haven’t asked you?

Warburton (laughing): What our model plans are for the next five years (laughing). I guess I should tell you we are doing very well. Doing better than most. Production sales last year sold more models than ever, in the history of Triumph. Officially, we are more successful than Triumph has ever been for the last 107 years.

Willie Mac: Last question, how do you want to be remembered?

Warburton: Fondly (chuckling). As a motorcyclist, I suppose. Regarding the products that have been coming out for the last year, or so, I hope my judgments have been vindicated.