MRO Today - Visions of the future

Visions of the future

by Tom Hammel, editor

Victory’s Vision, a rolling ode to fearless innovation and a company’s faith in its ideas, gets it better than right.

Innovation is a cornerstone of American manufacturing — a key driver of American competitive strength in the world market. Let me introduce you to a prime example, one for the school books. If you’ve never seen it before, this is the Vision, the new world-class touring bike from Victory Motorcycles of Spirit Lake, Iowa. That’s right, Iowa.

Victory has been making motorcycles for more than 10 years, but never anything like this. No American motorcycle company, large or small, has built anything like this.

The Vision’s radical design and complexity forced Victory to rethink and in many cases reinvent its production processes to allow workers to build the Vision right beside Victory’s other models on the same production line.

Those reinvented processes created better ways for Victory to build every motorcycle it makes, not just the Vision. Highly integrated, air-assisted, ergonomically designed jigs, subassembly and assembly stations now make Victory bikes almost as comfortable to build as they are to ride. As radical as the Vision is, the productivity improvements Victory made to build it may be the company’s greatest innovation.

Every now and then, a product comes along that gets it just right. Victory’s Vision, a rolling ode to fearless innovation and a company’s faith in its ideas, gets it better than right. And yes, it’s from Iowa, swear to God.