ON THE ROAD AGAIN

Another of the new company’s challenges is that the allure of a reincarnated Indian has burned the motorcycle world once before. Almost 37 years after the beloved original Indian company folded in 1953, a colorful entrepreneur named Philip Zanghi said he had a plan to revive the teepee-shaped plant in Springfield, Mass., and start building new Indian motorcycles. Several years later, investors realized his plans were a sham, and in 1997, he was found guilty of securities fraud, tax evasion and money laundering.

This led to a 1998 Colorado court decision that a Canadian company could have the brand as long as it actually manufactured motorcycles under the Indian name. This company teamed up with the California Motorcycle Co.?a small builder of Harley-Davidson-style clone bikes based in Gilroy, Calif.?to begin making new motorcycles in the old classic style. Indian Motorcycle Company of America was reborn.

In an unusual step for a small manufacturer, the company decided to buy a full-blown, $1.3 million ERP package, Oracle 11.03, on which to run the new business. Making this investment at such an early stage forced the company to become a real business with real business practices, says Frank Wagenseller, Indian’s vice president of IT.

"Getting those [application] modules dictated everything from how we would receive products and treat suppliers; certify, inspect and move items to the work line; open and close work orders; and receive transactions," Wagenseller says. "As most companies develop, they define their business practices and then they go out and search for a piece of software. We did it completely opposite. We said, ’Here’s how the software works, so this is how we’re going to do business.’ Having a centralized database and centralized demand planning gives us a much better ability to react quickly to demand and make changes to forecasts and sales orders. The whole idea is to get lead times down, reduce costs and reduce our inventory carrying, and having all of these integrated processes together allows us to do that."

The company also set up a B2B extranet for its dealers based on Oracle’s Web Customer product. Every Indian dealer is connected to the system. More than 50 percent use it regularly to manage orders and accounts, look up product availability and check out new specs. They can also import data into their own Excel spreadsheets for further analysis.

As Indian got rolling, O’Connell liked what he saw. "The new company was built on the backbone of a fully integrated system with financial supply, dealer networks and all the elements needed to provide the right kind of information at the right time to make the right kind of decisions."