Foreword
TREK BICYCLE makes the best bicycles in the world—we just have a very clumsy process of doing it.
After working 13 years for the company in sales, I took over as the president of the company in June 1997. From a sales perspective I always knew that we were behind the curve in manufacturing but I had no idea what to do about it, or where to start. We were suffering from high manufacturing costs, long lead times, and a complete failure to build to schedule. These problems were compounded by the fact that we are in a seasonal business that has annual model changes for 100 percent of our bicycle products. As an organization, we rationalized the majority of our problems on our suppliers.
Not long after I became President, the head of our ...
