Jason27 said:
Daniel ..I highly doubt you sell 150 bikes a day. I seriously challenge that. I also highly doubt the moderators would manipulate feedback.
Your giving prodeco a bad name with your outrageous claims.
Give the customer his bike!!
PRODECO TECHNOLOGIES RESPONSE: This is Rob Provost, CEO of Prodeco Technologies. I am just using Daniel's company account to respond but will open my own account on Endless Sphere. In regards to this post. What Daniel stated and also in the Channel 10 News Video is that we could sell 150 Bikes per day and believe me we could. We however only have the capacity to build just under 50 per day but we took a step back and slowed it down this summer as we had a higher capacity before. The reason for the step back was to do more inhouse and take the quality up even a further notch. We realized more it was not just about building the bikes good but building each bike like it was the only bike we would ever build. We needed to train more and more people and today we are at 48 employees but withing 18 months expect to be at 100 employees. The amount of bikes we have the ability to produce almost follows how many employees we have. Not that 1 employee builds a whole bike but each bike takes almost a shift worth of time whether part is 90 minutes in prep, 180 minutes on the line, 60 minutes in adjusting, 60 minutes in wheel building, 45 minutes in cleaning and shipping, etc...
Our new building which we are moving in between October and December has 8 production lines. Each line has 7 stations. The station can turn 2.5 times per shift. This does not including prepping stations which we have 4 of them and adjusting and torque stations which we also have 4 of. Then there are 4 quality control stations and 4 shipping stations. 1 prep station feeds 2 production lines. The prep station is where handlebars are prepared, wheels are tired, forks are braked, etc.. The production line has bearings installed, headesets, kickstands, drive train, forks, stems, wheels, electronics, etc.. Once complete the bike heads to adjustment and torque stations where each bike is adjusted and all torque settings are double checked. From there the bike goes to quality control and every bike is inspected in detail including electronics, adjustments doubled checked, brakes, derailleurs, paint finish, etc.. After that they go to cleaning and finally packaging to be shipped. The wheels are indivisually built and laced with balance and truing done by a team of 6 guys. We however just purchased Holland Mechanics latest machines for our new building to assist with wheel building. One machine uses lasers to balance and true the wheels but the other machine still requires workers assisting with the lacing. The lacing machine shoots out the nipples and tightens them with a robotic arm. Each wheel is placed on a truing stand regardless and gone through by hand. It takes anywhere from 6 ot 8 hours to build each bike. If running 2 shifts, the new building will pump out some serious numbers.
In regards to the post and manipulation, I mention that in another post but understand why.
In regards to Champion, I reference them also in other posts and that dealership was closed this past May but we tried our best to work with Champion on getting the bikes out up through July. We never had the details on the last 100 or so customers and we do not even know if he had payment. During the final 4 months, we only charged him when the bike was being built and shipped, we had no idea who the customer was or where the bike was going up until 1 or 2 weeks before shipping. Some orders were 6 months old before we even seen the order. We would only make an invoice when he gave the details to us of who purchased the bike, so we did not know who the customers were for the last 100 or so bikes. We also could not ship bikes if we had no customer detail and no payment. We were told by him that the customers he accepted payment on, he refunded. I believe Champion originally did not realize we build each bike to order and thought we bought completed bikes. He probably did not understand what goes into building each bike. He also did not want to lose a sale so took it.
For the 2013 model year (starts in November), we will be very cautious of the dealer base we have. All new agreements will be required. Our screening process is much more involved and we including a code of conduct and ethics in the agreement. It is important dealers do not sell models of bikes before we are able to start shipping them. For the most part, today's dealer base is pretty solid and we do not have any rougue dealers that we know of except the one who resells our bikes with stickers over our decals and says it is his own bike.
Thank you Jason for posting your concerns which allowed me to answer them. Daniel probably did not state it clearly that we have request for 150 per day but not that we do not produce that amount. - Robert Provost, CEO, Prodeco Technologies.
Wow Ahh !... LFP ??..
