Cycle News

Cycle News Issue 36 September 12, 2017

Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles

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TRIUMPH THAILAND FACTORY VISIT P104 Feature blog sites about, 'This isn't made here' and 'This isn't made there,' but I think what a lot of people fail to recognize is that for every motorcycle company, this is a global business. It's virtually impos- sible to build any motorcycle just out of components that are manufactured in one country, and it certainly wouldn't be economical to do so. "Cost does come into it as well—look at things like the exhaust headers, or fuel tank assemblies we make in Factory 3 here. You couldn't possibly afford to buy those from a UK supplier. So, you're then left with a choice of, 'Well, do I want to go and work with a supplier in another country'? And then if you do, have all of the risks of doing so, and to some degree, less control over what that sup- plier's doing, and whether he supplies on time? Or do we want to invest in ourselves, put a facility in-house ourselves, and have our own management team looking after it? And, by the way, also get the benefits of learning from doing that manufactur- ing, and being able to use that learning to feed back into the design engineers. So that the next time they're designing a header system, we can say to them, 'Ah, but did you know, actually we now have the capability to get a tighter bend radius on that part?' We can actually improve the product based on the fact that we do that ourselves, rather than passing all of that over to somebody else." Having now visited Triumph's Thai trio of factories, I have to say that makes per- fect sense. CN (Above) A surprising degree of flexibility allows production of models to be shifted back and forth between the UK and Thailand. the UK.

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