How did your adventure with Feber company start? Till the end of 2009 you were directing the Polish branch of ZF.
For 15 years I had been working abroad, in German companies, but mostly on African market. It was a good school of life, because if you can make it there yourself, no-one will help you. Next 15 years I spent in Warsaw division of ZF concern. The proposal which came from Krzysztof Oleksowicz about leading a company manufacturing vehicles was a chance for me to take a challenge once again.
What were the problems of Feber at that time?
I went to Sieradz to check the situation. It turned out that the company had some problems, but not resulting from some serious mistakes, but rather from general situation. Feber started its activity on the turn of 2004 and 2005, when there was boom in the truck industry, but later came the crisis and in 2008 the sales stopped.
I started my work from building a team composed mostly of young people like Andrzej Kajda. There were 16 “white collars” in total, and from the very beginning I made it clear: if one of us fails, we all failed, because the customers do not care why they did not get something, but the fact that they did not get it.
Krzysztof Oleksowicz said that at that time he used to consult you “5 minutes each day”, so in total it took just a week of work.
It is a nice story, but in fact it took two years before implemented changes were noticed by the market. We put quality first, because we could not be a second Wielton - it was just not this scale of production. We had to stand out somehow and we wanted to look for customers in the West, not in the East.
What exactly does quality mean as regards a semi-trailer?
Our semi-trailer is supposed to travel up to one million kilometres within 5 years with no problems. It is supposed to be behind the truck tractor and not draw attention. In order to achieve that, we needed to use top quality components and low and low weight, i.e. alloy construction which required suitably trained and controlled solderers.
I also changed the way of selling the semi-trailers. Before, the sales representatives asked the customer: “what semi-trailer would you like”, now we ask: “what do you want to transport?” and construct the best solution for the needs of customer. Of course, at the beginning most of the customers replied “everything”, so we had to ask “but what will you transport most often?” and next “what even more often?”. This was because every customer came to us with an idea of buying a universal semi-trailer which never meet his expectations, and we give him a perfect semi-trailer for transporting 70-80% of goods, and for the special occasions he can always rent a different vehicle from our rental. Simple example - customer transports potatoes but only seasonally and at that time he needs 40sqm capacity. But regularly he transports sand and for that reason 27sqm is enough. So it is better for him to buy a smaller semi-trailer, easier in driving, and occasionally rent a bigger one from us.
This worked, today all the production till the end of holidays is sold. We sell the same quality semi-trailers in Poland, Germany or France. We are also present in Scandinavian countries, where the permissible mass of a vehicle is 56 tons. For large manufacturers special production for that market is not profitable, but for us it is.
So Feber became a specialist of producing tailored semi-trailers?
This is how our configurator works. Sometimes the customer comes with particular dimensions and we can explain him that, for example, extremely high side board makes no sense, as the same capacity one can create by making the trailer just a bit longer.
From the point of view of production, this means possibility of using precest elements. This shortens the production process. If I get an order for a particular semi-trailer today, I can have it ready in 3 days. We need 170-200 man-hours to produce one semi-trailer, and on average we produce over two vehicles per day.
Every one is made to order?
We practically do not produce for stock, so all the vehicles under construction already have their owners, though sometimes this owner is our rental. We try not to let the semi-trailers being driven in the rental for more than a year, as they are a driving promotion of our company, and we always want our customers to rent newer and better semi-trailer.
Each manufactured semi-trailer has a customer number and QR code, on the basis of which one can tell for whom this vehicle was produced, when and who assembled it and with what equipment.
What is the lifetime of such a trailer?
Tippers used for transporting sand or in mines “live” for about five years. However we can still see on the roads some vehicles from the beginning of our production, i.e. The years 2005/2006, which are still doing quite well. We need to remember that Feber is a specialist of all trailers and semi-trailers, if they are tippers.
Source:motofaktor. pl
2015-07-10
back