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Customer Profile:
Five Seasons Counts on
CoachCrafters All Year
"CoachCrafters was the best run and cleanest." —Bill
Hoekstra, Five Seasons Transportation
"Since 1993, CoachCrafters has remanufactured every bus we have and
installed wheel-chair lifts on all but two," says Bill Hoekstra, transportation
and parking director of Five Seasons Transportation, Cedar Rapids.
He’s quick to point out that they’ve also bought eight used buses
from CoachCrafters and have been very satisfied.
Cedar Rapids did an extensive
study of potential vendors before they chose CoachCrafters. They toured
applicants’ remanufacturing
plants and concluded that "CoachCrafters was the best run and cleanest," says
Hoekstra.
"They also understand their customer pretty well," he
added. "Anyone who can go from selling to remanufacturing, from
clients with six or seven buses to working with Disney World—they
have something there that everyone wants."
"For our smaller
customers," says
Wayne Wolf, CoachCrafters president and owner, "we take the experience
we’ve had working with larger companies, meet with the maintenance
director, evaluate their bus fleet and help them determine what needs
to be done. They can then take that information and go out for bid." Ultimately,
though, price is only part of the equation to winning a bid. "We’ve
been at this for 19 years," says Wolf. "I think we do
the best quality work and the best follow-up work in the industry."
CoachCrafters’ motto
is to have no surprises for the customer. They use digital photos
of the work in progress and email detailed, visual reports to customers.
In Hoekstra’s
case, that included a start-to-finish video, from tearing the bus
down to the frame to building it up like new again.
Remanufacturing
a bus
saves Cedar
Rapids about 50 percent of the cost of a new one, and Hoekstra
claims the remanufactured units last just as long as the new ones.
Five of the
buses
Cedar Rapids purchased from CoachCrafters in 1994 are still in
service. Another they purchased in 1996 has more than 1 million
miles on it.
Operating
a fleet
of fewer than 50, Hoekstra recognizes the importance of keeping
his buses standardized. CoachCrafters’ range of services—remanufacturing,
retrofitting, repair and used bus sales—satisfies all his
needs. He says that the personalized service he receives goes
a long way towards
keeping
his fleet at full capacity.
That personalized service includes
looking out for clients even when they don’t expect it. As
CoachCrafters’ employees
travel the country or bring in used buses, they have their clients
in mind. "He
lets me know what’s out there, about buses to be remanufactured."
"When
Wayne says he’s going to do something, he always does it," says
Hoekstra. "Wayne is more than a vendor, he’s a friend—a
guy that you want to go back and do business with."
Five Seasons
Transportation has been sending their buses exclusively to CoachCrafters
for remanufacturing
and repair since 1993.
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