"It’s not like we’re bleeding edge here," says Wagenseller. "The idea is that you’ve got to change the culture of the organization and really map out the actual business processes to what’s going on in the system. That was the significant challenge here?getting the kind of people who understood how to run a business and then getting them familiar with the applications themselves. The challenge has been really mapping the physical processes to what’s going on in the system."

Indian’s full-bore ERP investment is both uncommon and innovative, says Kevin Prouty, research director of automotive strategies at AMR Research in Boston. "It’s farsighted to take the approach of thinking of systems first and building the way you do business around them from the start. Not that many companies start that way, but it allows you to scale up and grow, so it makes a lot of sense."

HAIL TO THE CHIEF

In 2000 the new Indian company began to quickly turn out motorcycles with styling that echoed the classic 1948 Indian Chief model, but the guts of the new machine didn’t exactly impress the motorcycle world.

"Their first Chiefs have been a necessity of invention to satisfy the court mandate. They had to turn out things quickly, and that’s what they’ve done," says David Edwards, editor in chief of the Newport Beach, Calif.-based motorcycle bible Cycleworld. "It has the feel of a kit bike, which in essence it is. It’s not a stem-to-stern conception as a bike should be."

The company will need to cater to the motorcycle crowd, according to Don Brown, a motorcycle industry analyst at DJB Associates in Irvine, Calif.

"Their belief is that people will beat a path to their door to buy a motorcycle that has an Indian name, but that’s just a piece of a very complex puzzle," he says. "They have fancy brochures and talk a lot to the press about what they’re doing, but eventually they will have to come out with legitimate products and sell them to real motorcyclists in order to be successful."

Edwards summarizes the motorcycle public’s wait-and-see attitude. "If they just continue to turn out Harley clones with Indian fenders, I think they’ll be seen as a pretend motorcycle company. But if they come out with a completely new engine on an improved chassis with improved bike dynamics, that’s a different and much more interesting story."

FALSE START

This isn’t the first time someone has tried to crack the cruiser motorcycle market by reviving a historic name. In 1993, David and Dan Hanlon, two brothers from Belle Plaine, Minn., relaunched the Excelsior-Henderson motorcycle brand that had been dead since 1931. They raised nearly $100 million through private funding and a public stock offering, built a state-of-the-art manufacturing plant and began producing brand-new Excelsior-Henderson cruisers. Analysts said the growing market seemed to have room for more manufacturers, but in December 1999, only eight months after the first bike rolled off their assembly line, the Hanlons filed for bankruptcy. Excelsior-Henderson hasn’t made a motorcycle since.