Page 29 - Newcom

and has a plan to further expand its presence.
“We want the next 50 years to be just as awesome, and more so, than the last 50 have been,” she said.
For inspiration, the company looked to its sister company Freight- liner to see how it has become the market share leader in the on-high- way segment of the Class 8 market.
“What is it that made us really, really good and what is unique about the on-highway market?” Platt asked.
She credited Freightliner’s suc- cess with a product design that she said resulted in the most cost-effective vehicle in the mar- ketplace to operate, and an unsur- passed dealer network.
But the vocational truck market is different. Platt noted many of these customers keep their trucks for 10 or more years, they’re usually ser- viced by the selling dealerships, and customers require more help from their OEM to optimize the spec’. Reliability is also crucial in the vocational truck market, she added.
“We have to build trucks that are going to last,” she said. “The bodies are so much more expen- sive than the cab chassis portion of the trucks, so they want to be able to use them for a long time – fre- quently 10 years or more. They can’t be disposable. It has to be some- thing that is going to last, in order to make it a good value proposition for our customers.”
Western Star is also taking steps to expand its dealer network, and Platt said it’s being cautious about the types of dealers it brings on. They must have an innate under- standing of the vocational truck market and its intricacies.
“It’s frequently service that sells the truck, and not necessarily the sales guy,” Platt said.
Her vision, to ensure Western Star lives to celebrate its 100th birth- day, is to ensure the brand is “cus- tomer-focused” and has a “commit- ted dealer network.”
“We think this is going to be one of the real keys to our being a grow- ing player in the vocational market- place,” she said. TN
In conversation with Kelley Platt, Western Star president
Platt discusses diversity, growing market share, and expanding the dealer network
By James Menzies
PHOENIX, ARIZONA
In addition to overseeing the West- ern Star truck brand, Kelley Platt also serves as chief diversity officer for par- ent company Daimler Trucks North America (DTNA). It’s a role she clearly relishes and finds gratifying, and she spoke of the benefits of improving diversity during a one-on-one inter- view with Truck News Apr. 27.
“We want everybody to feel com- fortable bringing their authentic self to work every day,” she explained.
DTNA’s efforts to become more diverse included changing where it has tra- ditionally recruited talent from, so it can appeal to a more diverse base. It works with organizations that represent female and Afri- can American engineers to attract a broader demo- graphic. Platt is confident the efforts are paying off.
“We are definitely seeing tangible benefits,” she said. “Not only do we have a more diverse workforce, the more diverse your workforce is, the more likely you are to get better solutions to problems.”
They include parenting groups, for example, who organize bring your kids to work activities.
In addition to concentrating on improving DTNA’s diversity, Platt is also focused on growing the West- ern Star brand’s success within the organization. She has a plan to grow market share from about 3.4% to more than 8% by 2025. With the recent additions of the 5700XE and 4700, Western Star now boasts the broadest product portfolio in its his- tory. Platt said she sees an opportu- nity for the brand to grow both its
periods of time than on-highway users and usually don’t have spare trucks parked against the fence, so uptime is critical. Nor can they call up Penske or Ryder and order a replacement truck when one breaks down, as they are usually highly specialized vehicles.
“We look for somebody who builds relationships with their customers,” Platt said of the ideal Western Star dealer. “Some- body who knows their custom- ers, knows the kinds of concerns they have, knows their operat-
ing cycles, knows how to support those trucks in the long-term, and how to fix them at the customer’s location or to get them in and out of the shop quickly, because time is serious money to these guys.”
Western Star dealers must also be able to help customers spec’ the right trucks in the first place and work with body builders to get the trucks ready to roll without delay.
“It’s much more compli- cated (than on-highway) and it’s a long-term relation-
ship,” Platt said.
Since vocational truck buyers
operate their trucks for longer life-cycles than on-highway fleets, Platt said the dealer-customer rela- tionship is vital and must be fos- tered. Platt doesn’t feel Western Star has any glaring holes in its product line.
“We are pretty happy with where we are, but we’re always looking to improve what we’ve got and think- ing about where we want to be three, five, 10 years down the road,” she said. “So, a lot of time and effort is going into trying to figure out where the industry is going, where customers are going, and what we want to do differently.” TN
Platt has been a proponent of networking since even before she took on her current role as head of diversity two years ago. She was involved in setting up a network- ing group for female managers within DTNA. Daimler calls these employee resource groups (ERGs).
“The first one we did was a women networking group about a decade ago,” Platt recalled. “We discovered there were about a dozen women in management all across DTNA at that point in time and they didn’t even all know each other.”
Additional ERGs have been set up to appeal to various segments of the employee population within DTNA.
vocational and on-highway market share. To do so, the dealer network must be expanded, Platt said.
“There are still parts of the coun- try we don’t play in at all because we don’t have a distribution network there,” she admitted. “We’ll fix that problem. We will play in all markets in the US and Canada.”
But while there are many inter- ested dealers looking to represent the brand, Platt said the company won’t accept just anyone. It wants dealers that truly understand the needs of vocational truck buyers. After all, vocational truck oper- ators are a different breed. They operate their trucks for longer
Kelley Platt, president of Western Star Trucks.
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June 2017 • Truck News 29