Magazine serving the bus and rail transit & motorcoach operations since 1904
Issue link: https://metromag.epubxp.com/i/131307
transit business tation market around the mid- to late-70s. By 1989, we were completely out of the retail distribution business and dedicated 100 percent to manufacturing. We now have a 150,000-square-foot facility that is our headquarters. Is there pressure to grow and maintain what's been built by your father and grandfather? Of course, we feel pressure. It is a competitive marketplace, and the demands of customers have changed over the years. We have access to information at a moment's notice. Things move faster, so we need to adapt quickly to continue to grow as a company and meet our customers' needs. Te other challenge for any company, especially one that is family owned and been around for as long as ours has, it's easy to get stuck in your ways. We spend a significant amount of time analyzing what we do right and wrong and challenging ourselves to change the way we think to look for newer and better ways of doing things. Case in point, over the last six months we have brought in a team of consultants to analyze our customer service here, look at our people and processes, and see if there's a more efcient way to provide a better customer experience. How have REI's long-term relationships played a role in the evolution of your products and innovations? It's nice for us to go to events, shows, and meetings and shake hands with good friends — people you have known for years and years. We support their businesses, they are supporting our business, and we share the same challenges and successes. It's just nice to be able to deal with people who respect what you do and know that you respect what they do. When we are working with manufacturers and discussing electronic innovations, we can advise them because we too have talked to the customer. Many times, the customer they sell the bus to is the same customer we are selling our products to. We can stand together with their engineering, purchasing and management teams and explain why we are developing the concepts and ideas that 18 < mETRO mAGAZINE JUNE 2013 we are. In our markets, we communicate not just with the manufacturers of the vehicle, but also the dealers, distributors and end users of products. We focus on tying together all of those diferent entities in the marketplace to make sure we have our fnger on the pulse of what's going on, what's needed and what the hot buttons are. Discuss the innovations you have introduced into the markets you serve. In the motorcoach industry, we introduced video systems in the mid-80s. Every thing prior to that had just been an audio system. We developed the frst integrated video system in the motorcoach market, which was a big turning point for us because we went from selling a radio and some speakers to something much more complex. REI's team has been celebrating its 75 years with its customers at various trade shows including January's UMA Expo. Today, a motorcoach can have 36 speakers with subwoofers, video systems backlit by LED, HD monitors, a wireless microphone system or digital audio players; a variety of customer-friendly technologies. Another innovation was mobile video surveillance, which is about 35 percent of our business. In 1991, we developed our first surveillance system, which records activity in and around the vehicle. We market this technology to the transit, school, commercial vehicle and motorcoach industries with business continuing to grow year over year. In the early 90s, surveillance was a VCR-based system, and then evolved into digital in the late 90s. The newest trend, which REI's on the cutting edge with, is surveillance and audio vehicle locator (AVL) systems. We're tying together the ability to have surveillance on the vehicle with analyzing driver behavior and passenger information systems. Customers now know when a bus is going to arrive or depart. In the case of city transit, with REI's system, passengers can use a cell phone app and know the next bus is going to arrive in three minutes. It's important to tie these technologies together for an enhanced customer experience. It's one of our biggest challenges, yet one our team is most excited about working on today. What are some current industry trends and REI's role in those trends going forward? A large project we have is the development of surveillance and AVL technology. We want to enhance these technologies to make transits more efective and safer. Today, we provide passenger counting to inform a transit agency if a vehicle is full and they need to dispatch additional vehicles. We can do rerouting; if there is construction or an accident in a particular area, we can route around them. We can do text messaging to let parents know when children get on or of a school bus. Tere are just a few examples of REI's safety and security initiatives. Another new direction is the advancement of driver behavior modules, so you can not only have a clean, safe vehicle but good driving behavior behind the wheel as well. It is really about developing new technology tools to help enhance the experience and for bus owners to better maintain their vehicles, drivers and feets. Did you ever imagine you would play such a huge role in passenger safety? The markets have grown. We didn't envision what it is today back in 1991. Te scope of what it has become was unpredictable. People in the industries we serve have really embraced technology and realized the sky is the limit. To match their needs, we have a team of engineers developing the next latest and greatest generation of electronic transportation products. It will be exciting to see what's next. metro-magazine.com