the buyer’s physical stature. “You can actually sit on the Hardrider and feel exactly how the motor-
cycle is going to feel,” says McCollum. “Once you get comfortable, you can enter those settings into our configurator as well.”

The motorcycles are built in assembly line fashion at a series of six stations, with one worker at each station. “Once all of the raw materials hit the building, the motorcycle only takes about four to five days to complete,” McCollum says. Hardbikes maintains about a month’s worth of inventory of commonly used parts at each station, and places orders for other, less commonly used parts as needed, with a special eye toward components that might present timing issues.

But he is also quick to point out that Hardbikes has an ongoing program for maximizing parts standardization, which it sees as key to the company’s flexibility. “We have a whole library of parts that you can use to build a motorcycle, and we rank them on how many of our products each part is used on,” McCollum notes. A component that is used on all four of the company’s motorcycle platforms is ranked a 4, a part used on three platforms is a 3, and so on.

standard parts

“We don’t have a problem inventorying number 4s, but we do have a problem inventorying number 1s, because then we’re obviously at risk for obsolescence,” McCollum observes. The company sets goals for its engineering staff to eliminate a certain number of 1-ranked parts from its parts list each quarter, because “that keeps things flexible, and that’s what makes mass customization work. We’ve got to have standardization across all of these platforms in order for us to efficiently make all these bikes.”

In assembling the bikes, Hardbikes employees work from the bill of materials on each order, using inventoried parts housed at each station; a tagging system with Hardbike-specific part numbers aids identification, and each worker goes through various quality checkpoints. The line can build up to eight motorcycles per week, Scott says, and the company has a plan for boosting capacity when it’s needed by installing a parallel line, enabling each operator to work on two bikes at a time.

Hardbikes shipped about 150 motorcycles in 2006, its first full year of operation, according to Scott, and currently has 17 dealers, mostly east of the Mississippi river. The company plans to increase its dealer count to 50 by yearend, and expects to become profitable in 2007, he adds.

McCollum says he has worked with Hardbikes founder Gene Kirila at several previous companies that have practiced mass customization methodologies. And he hints that Hardbikes won’t be the last. “We think that this whole business model can apply to a lot of other markets, not necessarily just custom motorcycles,” he concludes.  

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