A veteran of the North American commercial vehicle manufacturing business, John Stevenson has been with Daimler-Chrysler for six years and is currently the president of American LaFrance.

Previously he served as plant manager for Freightliner's Cleveland, N.C., facility, which employs 4,000 people in the production of heavy-duty trucks.

A native of Pittsburgh, Stevenson began his career in commercial vehicles in 1986. He began his career working on the floor while attending night school for both his business and engineering education. He worked for Mack for 10 years as quality engineer, senior quality engineer and manager of manufacturing engineering, after previous experience in the automotive industry. He was also a plant manager for Volvo.

You certainly bring a wide range of experience to American LaFrance and have made changes in your nine months at ALF.

I've been in almost all aspects of the business. I've been in sales, marketing, purchasing, worked in quality and in operations. Coming to American LaFrance for me is an opportunity to bring all those experiences and put them to use at one company.

American LaFrance is like owning your own company, only I didn't have to purchase it. I spent 10 years with Mack, and my goal was to be president of a company that has a lot of heritage and that was vocational in nature because the bond with the customer is so much stronger on the vocational side. Now I'm president of a company that has 173 years of heritage, has a vocational status and has that bond with the customers, and that's the important point.

What are your immediate goals?

First of all, to restore ALF back to its heritage. What I mean by that is to take it back to its place in the market where it should be, as a leader.

You do that three different ways: You have to restore the quality in the product; you have to restore the delivery of the product — it's got to be on time; and you've got to take a look at the waste in the organization in order to make [the product] cost competitive. Those are the three things we are targeting right now.

The first six months, we're targeting quality and bringing the quality up to the point where it's better than anything else. All vehicles that leave ALF are audited by senior management.… Basically, when I came to American LaFrance in October, the vehicles were not what I considered to be presentable to customers. So I immediately instituted a program where no vehicle would leave without being audited by senior management.

My direct reports and I audit the vehicles. I'm a vehicle person, so I go over the vehicles with a fine-tooth comb. It became very obvious to the employees, very quickly, that I knew trucks. We even put in a pit so that we could inspect underneath the vehicle, because half of the vehicle you don't see and it's the operational half, all the wiring, and all your lines, all your pump connections, a lot of things underneath the vehicle that you can't see with just a creeper.

It was very interesting: The first vehicle we audited, we wrote up numerous items on the truck. I asked about the truck a day later and they said the truck was shipping at 2:30 that afternoon. I said, “No, I'm re-auditing the vehicle,” and you could see around the room that the senior staff was aware that I was going back in and that I was setting the expectations even higher. [The time] came when they were going to ship the vehicle and they said the vehicle wasn't ready to be presented to me. I said I didn't understand; I thought they going to ship the vehicle and now it's not ready for me to review? We audited that vehicle three times before that truck was allowed to ship after meeting our expectations. It started raising the bar.

On subsequent audits, if there were repetitive problem areas we'd call the supervisors and the employees up and we'd drive that expectation down through every level of the organization: We will not allow our image to be tarnished by putting a vehicle in front of a customer that isn't worthy of the American LaFrance heritage.

We started that in October, and right now the vehicles are almost where they need to be. No magic. Just the basics. We did that with the quality side. As the quality side was coming up, it was obvious there were also operational inconsistencies and changes with personnel that needed to be made.

One thing that I need to do when I go into an organization is to envision for myself what the company is going to look like. Other than the quality side, I spent two to three months analyzing American LaFrance. Some people said that others go into a new organization and within the first 100 days they turn all the people over. Otherwise you're not doing anything.

For me, I can't lead an organization that doesn't have a clear vision because I need to know what the destination is. I spent those months analyzing, talking with numerous employees at all different levels — whether it was subsidiaries or on the floor, dealers, customers — everybody. What do they want from American LaFrance? Most of the time the answers are there and people fail to read or accept them. Generally, the people you need are right in front of you. You don't have to go in and shatter an organization.

After two or three months, I had the vision where I wanted to take ALF and the steps that needed to be taken. At that time, I sat down with my senior organization and said we're going to move to the platform team structure and we're going to break up each one of the individual departmental silos and go cross-functional.

What we did in the platform teams, we took everyone from sales application engineering, customer engineering, production, service and warranty for a specific vehicle, and that team was then moved to one locale. They now own that vehicle cradle to grave. They're empowered to make any change that the vehicle needs that doesn't affect the architecture, safety or integrity of that vehicle.

Then we're bringing customers in once every quarter to audit the group. That way the group is transparent and stays customer-focused. They analyze everything from how the order comes in, how it's translated, how customer engineering deals with it, how production builds it and any service and warranty items that are affected with it. They do a report card on that team, and that team will basically reinvent itself based on the input. It's been tremendous.

I took a look at the organization and asked who I had that were leaders. When I took the company over, it was pretty much one department pitted against the other; that's how the previous regime worked. I was refereeing and very quickly said it had to stop. I said we're going to be one team: We succeed together or we fail together. There's not going to be one shining star, it's going to be heroes as an organization.…

As we started putting the platform teams together, it became a threat very quickly to some senior management. If you're running a department of 100 people, you learn very quickly that you lose control of those people when they go to the platform teams, and you end up with strategic functions rather than operational ones. Kingdoms get taken down, and now the production guy on the floor gets the additional resources. He has all the resources on his team that can change a drawing, change bill-of-materials, contact a customer, interface with a supplier, change manufacturing processes or whatever is necessary to build it correctly the first time. Instead of finger-pointing, you get results. It has improved performance from 58% to 94% for some products in just three months. And it has done so while improving quality.

We brought things forward and worked six days a week to get on schedule. Quality and delivery were the key focuses. Having the quality force the delivery side, even to the point we're at now, allows us to build far more, much more efficiently than the order input is allowing us to do, because the order input was from a year ago when ALF was struggling. Now we can build much more and much faster because of higher quality, so we have this void, which the new Liberty is filling in because they are quick-turnaround vehicles — 150 days.

The quality and delivery has significantly improved. Most of the sales network was used to making excuses — many valid — about why they couldn't sell, and those excuses have been taken away much faster than they expected. We brought new innovation to the company: the front-end independent suspension, the rollover stability that they've been asking for.

Did you lose a lot of your dealers?

Over the last couple years, we've lost some. In November we had a dealer council meeting, and basically we have 39 dealers and the majority are Freightliner dealers — 60% — and 40% are ALF fire equipment. The fire apparatus and service equipment are the core of our dealers. We need to grow that type of dealer network. We lost the focus of a number of Freightliner dealers, because the truck market is so strong. We're going to try and rebuild our distribution on more fire-dedicated dealers.

It's been refreshing that our competitors have seen the turnaround. Six months ago I couldn't have bought a competitive dealer, and now we've got them calling us. They see the changes, the comments from the customers and they see other companies struggling.

We are going to be very careful about the dealers we put on, because it's a long-term investment to us. I want to make sure that they can be successful and help us be successful. We're going to make sure we can protect and support our dealers.

What is the single weakness you see now?

Distribution. Distribution is the single, biggest item. We need to build a very strong dealer and distribution network. We have to get that front end of the business going. That's where we're the weakest right now, and we need to strengthen that with some key dealers.

What about existing vehicles that are out there, built prior to your changes?

We purchased some. Honestly, we couldn't get them where they needed to be, so we repurchased some back.

We've done a tremendous amount of work trying to clean up all the old issues out there. We're building a nationwide organization of service people. We've got four of six right now in place. They are literally going into areas where there are problems and living with that vehicle until it's corrected. We'll add two more service people and they're all nationally recognized service people in the industry — Joe Verrill, Roy Gotshall, Bob Meyer and Jimmy Faulkner are already on board. They are fully empowered and we're careful to bring on people that have long experience, know the industry, know the product, and know the people.

I had one chief call me and say, “OK, Mr. President, you're the third president that I've talked to. I have this vehicle, it's 2,500 pounds overweight and I can't certify it to run in our state and I can't stop it when it's full of water. What are you going to do about it?” He had been through three different administrations, and here's a chief who's never been reacted to. We took that vehicle, gave him a loaner. It's been upgraded, re-certified and it's usable in that state.

That's why we're building a service organization out there. Correcting the ills doesn't get you the next order, it means you're doing what you should have done in the first place, but at least it gives you integrity and you can build on that.

Do you see your customer base changing?

Age-wise it's changing because of all the younger chiefs coming on and looking for the newer technology, versus the older chiefs that have traditionally stayed with the same products.

For us, when we talk about different customers, ours will be driven by being in a different segment of the market. We generally played in the high end of the market, but now with the Liberty trucks coming out and some other vehicles we're going to release in August, now we're playing in a wider market and a different customer base. It brings us a lot more volunteers in a broader community that we're going to be dealing with. It's exciting for us because we've had outstanding response to our Liberty series. We've quoted over 200 responses to these vehicles and we've booked some of them already — much more than we could have anticipated.

We want to be a full-fledged supplier in what we're introducing shortly. When our salespeople go in and sit down with a chief, we need to provide that for him and then give him the service he needs. The Liberty has brought a tremendous new market to us. That's the change of our customer base, more than technology or other changes in the market.

It's interesting you have the strong tradition and history, yet new technology evolving daily.

You want to make sure it's not technology for technology sake. It's got to be something that really adds value. It's one thing to go out and market innovations a lot of people want like airbags. We recognize airbags add value, but rather than take a reactive position, we also want to take a proactive side to it. We're pushing roll stability — we don't want the truck to roll over. Rather than put pads in it if the truck does roll over, we don't want people to get injured. We're asking what brings more value to the customer, so we're doing more and more on the proactive side.

We'll now start using our parent company, Daimler-Chrysler, to see what innovations — across the world, not just the U.S. — that we can bring to this type of vehicle and this type of vocational market, to add value to the vehicle whether it's in safety, the performance arena or so forth, that makes it a better vehicle for the user.

What's your take on the future of fire trucks?

It's a steady 5,000-truck market, but 2007 will be an interesting year because new emissions technology demands a tremendous amount of investment, engineering and design from the companies. Some will make it and some will not be able to put that investment in. In 2007, I see the 5,000-truck market being shared with fewer companies who will control that market share.

Homeland security is growing, with more command posts. Does the sense of urgency from 9/11 start to wane and budgets associated with that start to drop off and it returns to the traditional fire service-type industry? Right now it's strong and growing.

A proposal for NFPA 1901 is that vehicles after a certain age should be retired. What are your thoughts on this proposal?

I think you're going to see more new technology in the fire service in the next 10 years than you've seen in a very long time. This is because companies are getting broader and there's more global interaction, global markets. I personally talk about seven-year turnover; it's not bad to take them out of service after seven years with all the new technology in the marketplace.

We build a vehicle that's reactionary — it has to respond in seconds. If we introduce new technology to make it respond faster, you don't want to hold that back from the marketplace and service the public accordingly. I'd like to see seven years and then take them out of first response and put them in reserve. As suppliers, we're going to need to help provide outlets for these vehicles. It isn't like they can just leave these in reserve and have a tremendous investment sitting there.

Another thing we have to do is take a look at the basics; if they only want to drive it seven years and then turn around, maybe we have to make the leases attractive enough so they can do that economically and be successful at it.

I see more leasing coming because of that. Why should someone spend $300,000 to 400,000 for one pumper when they can lease four for a yearly amount that is the same? We have to entertain much better leasing and even leasing and service combined so it's all in one package and it's easier to budget.

Where do you expect ALF to be in five years?

I expect to be one of the leaders. It's all there for us. We have a unique opportunity in where the industry is right now. We have a unique opportunity with our relationship with Daimler-Chrysler and building on the synergies of that frame. We've been given all the tools and made the changes in quality we had to make. We want to make the moves to build a strong foundation and put the company where it belongs in a certain period of time, but we're going to be selective of who we bring on board.…