Q&A: Daniel Whitehead, Daimler Truck & Bus

The new Managing Director of Daimler Truck & Bus Australia/Pacific, Daniel Whitehead, says the firm's recent restructure is sharpening its focus

In March 2014 Daimler Truck & Bus Australia/Pacific underwent a sizeable restructure that has seen each of its three brands – Freightliner, Mercedes-Benz and Fuso – assume full control of all aspects of each separate business, including aftersales.

The restructure sees the organisation fall in line with parent company Daimler AG's philosophy of 'Customer Dedication', which vests greater responsibility in each of the multinational's individual divisions and places a stronger focus on customers and separate markets.

Simultaneously, ultimate responsibility for the Australian subsidiary has shifted from a local President to a model where Daimler Truck & Bus Australia/Pacific now reports to Daimler Trucks North America.

Heading up the new paradigm for Daimler Truck & Bus Australia/Pacific is its recently-installed Managing Director, Daniel Whitehead. Mr Whitehead succeeded former Managing Director Kolja Rebstock from March 1, with his predecessor moving to Daimler AG to head up Mercedes-Benz trucks and vans for a number of world markets.

The new post represents a homecoming on two fronts for Mr Whitehead, with the 43-year-old father of three returning both to Australia and the truck industry after a decade with Daimler's passenger car division in China, where he most recently served as Executive Vice President of Aftersales.

It's been an adventurous, fascinating and circuitous journey for the country boy from western Victoria, but he says he's thrilled to be home and back in trucks, where his career first began.

trucksales.com.au recently caught up with Mr Whitehead at Daimler Truck & Bus Australia/Pacific's Melbourne headquarters to discuss his past, his new role, and his ambitions for Daimler Truck & Bus in this corner of the world.

trucksales.com.au: Let's start at the very beginning – how did you come to find yourself working in the truck industry?

Daniel Whitehead: My first job after I left uni was in trucks. I went to Deakin University in Warrnambool and did a business degree with accounting and finance majors, and then in 1993 I got an interview with PACCAR for its junior executive trainee program. They took four of us that year and I started at Kenworth, beginning with two months on the factory floor.

Part of the program was that you moved around every 12 or 18 months, so I spent time in sales, finance and then aftersales, and I loved it. Then my boss got head-hunted to Freightliner and not long after he offered me a job, and that's when the switch came.

TS: Is this your biggest professional challenge thus far?

DW: For sure. It's the first time I've been 'the boss'; you can't push anything off and say: 'Well, I'd say yes but check with…'. But it's good, I like it, and it's really nice to be back in truck sales after 10 years in cars. I like the commercial aspect of it and I like the customers more. It's driven by a different sort of money, a commercial interest. When customers are mad they normally have a very good reason and when you fix that problem they're also very respectful of the intent and effort and ethics. It suits my personality more.

TS: How long did you spend at Freightliner, before you moved into cars?

DW: I was with Freightliner for three years in aftersales, mainly parts. When I was brought across from PACCAR my first job was to run and structure the aftersales support for the American driveline. I moved into passenger cars after that, not for any particular reason other than it was an opportunity.

TS: How was your experience of China?

DW: My wife and I left for Hong Kong in November 2003. Back then we had distributors in China so I assisted with the set-up for the takeover of the distributorship. Daimler offered us a great opportunity – a vehicle to go overseas with the insurance blanket of already having a job. We went for adventure – it wasn't a career thing – but it was a good job and China was a new frontier. We did the set-up and then after two years we moved to Beijing and spent eight years there. It was an incredible time to be there; it was just pure luck to turn up at a time that I'm sure our kids will study in economics when they're at university like we studied the Industrial Revolution.

TS: You're now five months into your tenure as Managing Director of Daimler Truck & Bus Australia/Pacific and its major restructure. What was the motivation behind the restructure?

DW: Internally it's called Customer Dedication. It's primarily about structuring the business around the different business units and giving them holistic responsibility for all aspects of that business. Previously we had a passenger car division, we had a truck division, we had a global service and parts division, and finance. They were all separate in Germany and that was basically the model that was cascaded down to all the different markets.

Here Kolja [Rebstock] looked after Freightliner, Mercedes-Benz and Fuso, but there was a separate organisation here for aftersales. So you can imagine… we had different targets, different priorities, and staff all trying to do the right thing by the company but with a degree of self-interest … there wasn't this holistic view.

Now under Customer Dedication we're responsible for the commercial vehicle business in Australia from top to toe, so aftersales is part of the sales process – when we look at a service contract we can look at the whole profit on the deal and maybe adjust our service cost or our vehicle cost to get the better result.

I think Customer Dedication is by far the best way from a customer perspective to get a good result and frankly from my job perspective it's better because for better or worse it's all down to us now. If we mess it up, we mess it up – we can't look sideways. But if we do what we think we will, which is make a huge success of it, that's also good – and now we have all the tools in our hands to do that.

TS: Five months on, has everything settled down?

DW: Structure-wise it has, although we still have a few little tweaks to make based on four or five months' experience. We still don't have a head for Freightliner – we're still working on that [the recently appointed General Manager of Freightliner, Kristi Walker, unexpectedly returned to Daimler Trucks North America after just eight weeks in the role, citing family reasons].

It was always going to be evolutionary. I think the revolutionary part is in place – Customer Dedication was a big change from what we'd had in the past – but it will retain a need for constant tweaking and I'm of the view that it should also be based on who we have in the organisation. If we have someone who's a real expert at something we shouldn't be completely bound by the parameters of the structure.

TS: What's it like being responsible for three distinctly different brands?

DW: I think it's our biggest opportunity, to be honest. Most of the major customers in Australia aren't just running the one type of truck – they have a need for distribution, long-haul, metro. We have products that suit all of them plus essentially our own bank in Mercedes-Benz Financial Services. If we organise ourselves, structure ourselves and get ourselves set up in the right way, we have a package no-one else in the industry is able to offer. So that's my biggest aim – to have this Daimler approach to business whilst also maintaining the independence of the individual brands.

TS: Daimler Truck & Bus Australia/Pacific now reports to Daimler Trucks North America. Can you talk a bit about that?

DW: Before Australia/Pacific had a President who was entirely responsible for the business in Australia, but that's no longer the case – now we have a passenger car managing director, a commercial vehicle managing director, and a head of vans. We have a board of management but we don't have a CEO, which is interesting.

Under Customer Dedication commercial vehicles reports to Daimler Trucks North America because it's primarily seen first and foremost as a North American driveline market, and because based on the volume of export sales from the different countries DTNA was responsible for Australia. That doesn't mean we don’t talk to Japan and Germany – we do on a daily basis – but my direct reporting line is to Richard Howard, who is DTNA's Senior Vice President Sales & Marketing.

It [the arrangement] works because there's some flexibility in it. Because we're such a balanced market in terms of having three products we still deal pretty much directly [with Germany, Japan or the USA] but if we have structural issues or human resources issues DTNA is the signoff for our organisation here in Australia.

It's odd having a boss 17 hours away but in terms of where we sit Richard's very generous in his time and the support he gives Australia – he's very much helping us along.

TS: The Australian market is tough right now. What are your thoughts on Daimler's performance here in recent times?

DW: When you look at the first half of 2013 if you took the number to the end of June you would have thought the industry was going to have a cracking 12 months, but it just didn't happen. And if you look now at the first half of this year in the medium-duty category the market is down 10 per cent; Fuso's numbers are down but its market share is actually up.

You can always cut the numbers to make yourself feel better but I much prefer to measure market share, especially in the heavy-duty market where you're talking about 1000 trucks a year [for Daimler] and one bad month or one deal can actually change your view of the world.

We had a really solid Q2; we've taken some tremendous tender contracts where we haven't yet seen the retails come through but we've signed up some really good business and we're quoting on some fantastic business we're really confident about.

I think Customer Dedication is just finding its traction; it took everyone a little while to sort themselves out and become comfortable with the new structure and to be comfortable with me too, the new boss – after 10 years overseas there are not too many people here who already knew me.

It's been a big change for everyone but now I feel the wheels are really starting to get some traction – people are looking at Daimler in a different light, Mercedes-Benz in particular.

The Mercedes-Benz product is fantastic but for years it really hasn't done what it should have done. I think Volvo proves to everyone Australia is not just an American truck market; when you look at Volvo our market share is simply not acceptable.

It's an interesting time; you talk to our customers on the freight side and they say they've never been as busy but it's just not translating into people investing in equipment. It just seems to me that everyone's sort of thinking we're in a bubble, and if there was a little pop of the bubble then everyone would then invest. There's no reason behind it – the overall market sales don't match up with the overall market business.

TS: What specific areas across the portfolio are in need of improvement?

DW: I think aftersales support is somewhere where we can always improve. We also have to build a stronger relationship with our engine supplier for greater support and that's something we're working very hard on, and we need to find a successor to Kristi [Walker] as the head of Freightliner.

That's a bit of a quandary; we have to take our time and find the right person for the next 10 years. We're in the middle of at the moment; some people will be getting phone calls to see if they're interested; we interviewed people last week in the US and we've interviewed internally. I'm not putting a timeline on it – when we find the right person we'll find the right person.

TS: Are you happy with the current dealer networks as they stand?

DW: I'm fairly happy. There's always tweaking, but the network has to be a partnership – the dealers have to see a value in being our franchise. We need to give them products and support that means they're dedicated to selling as many of our products as possible.

It's my aim to make them all rich or richer than they are today, not because I'm nice but for purely selfish reasons – if we're selling more product we're healthier, they're healthier, and if they're rich they tend to be much more agreeable [laughs].

There's always room for improvement, for sure, and it's not a dictatorial relationship by any stretch – we have to be mutually moving forward.

TS: Does your role as Managing Director involve a fixed tenure?

DW: No, and it's the first time in a long time I haven't had to worry about a contract – I'm a full-time employee and it's nice. It means you can make an unpopular decision sometimes without having to worry. It's really nice to be back in a permanent job and taking a long-term view of things. Ten years down the track it's still going to be me; I'm really enjoying that part of it and I think it's healthy too.

Q&amp;A: Daniel Whitehead, Daimler Truck &amp; Bus

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Q&A: Daniel Whitehead, Daimler Truck & Bus