Issue link: http://www.insightdigital.biz/i/133826
Truck of the century Pierce celebrates 100 years making top-notch vehicles A hundred years ago, Auto Body Works began making trucks on Model T Ford chassis. That business, now called Pierce, has evolved and expanded over the years, turning into what most consider the premier fire truck maker in the nation. In fact, Pierce fire trucks account for 40 percent of the North American market, and that's expanding internationally. Why? Because it's all about what the customer wants. "Really, how we became number one is building a quality product, and then supporting that product," says Tim Smits, national sales manager for Pierce, which is owned by Oshkosh Corp. About 3,600 fire trucks are sold in North America each year, and 83 manufacturers compete for that business. Pierce is now selling about 1,400 trucks each year, Smits says. Oshkosh Corp., which owns Pierce Manufacturing, shows growth in its Fire & Emergency segment in the 2013 second quarter over the same time last year, up 3.3 percent to $174 million. Pierce is the largest company in Oshkosh's Fire & Emergency segment. Pierce's ambulance line, Med Tech, moved from Goshen, Ind., to Bradenton, Fla., but the company discovered it wasn't making money making ambulances. So several hundred workers were laid off last year when the w w w. i n s i g h t o n b u s i n e s s . c o m company stopped making them. "It surprises all of us, because we built bodies and electrical systems every day, but we just could not get the ambulance line profitable," Smits says. "So they said, 'Let's go back to our core business, which is fire trucks.' " The international market expanded for Pierce when it became part of Oshkosh Corp., which bought the company from the Ogilvie family in 1996. Pierce has just more than 1,800 employees in the Appleton facility and 674 of them have been there more than 20 years, says Smits, who himself has been at Pierce for 32 years. North America has about 34,000 fire departments and about 1.1 By Nikki Kallio on the web » Company website: www.piercemfg.com » Watch fire trucks in action: www.youtube. com/user/piercemfg million firefighters. So it wouldn't be uncommon to see a Pierce logo on a fire truck just about anywhere you travel, Smits says. Catering to global markets Trucks for international customers such as those in Brazil may require a narrower chassis to navigate narrower streets, for example. "It isn't like we can just take our product and bring it over there – we have to modify our products to kind of adapt to their environment," Smits says. "Here in the states, everything's a little bit bigger." But that challenge of making each truck a custom order is also what sets the company apart and has helped keep it strong, he says. "Years ago some of the competitors that are out of business today, they tried to standardize," [continued] » J u n e 2 013 • Insight | 29