Håkan Agnevall

• SJ: Volvo was once heavily engineering led. How to you see the balance of the decision making within Volvo today?

HA: It’s hard for me coming from the outside.

At this point UK MD of Volvo Bus, Nick Page, who was with us added, ‘I’ll give you an example of where I think it has changed, and that’s the B5TL double decker. That has been a customer and a commercial drive rather than the industrial system saying there you go, there’s your product, go off and sell it. That’s a real life example of how the tables have turned and goes back to what Håkan said on it being all about what are the customer’s requirements.

HA: From my own personal standpoint coming into the business, we need to be able to deliver a customised product, but our challenge to drive profitability and to be able to ensure quality for the customer, is to find modularised solutions so that we can have a good Lego box with modules we can combine in different ways and reuse, and also combine with standardised working methods. So that’s the challenge.

• SJ: With the advent of Euro6, is there any realistic possibility of a small family operator being able to maintain a vehicle when you can’t check the brakes without a computer?

HA: I’m going to have to pass that one over to Nick.

NP: It is getting more and more difficult for operators and tat’s not a Volvo position it’s the way that legislation is driving it. It comes back to, how can we support people like that to do that job? You know some of the initiatives we have in the UK like Mobile Frontline so that operators can keep their workshops and if they get to the position where they can’t advance, at least it’s a case of picking up the phone and we can get mobile support to their technicians, rather than them having to book a vehicle into a dealer and have to take it here to get it sorted out. Again, it’s trying to develop the portfolio to support the vehicles because it isn’t there now. We’ll train technicians and people can invest to a level on software, but again legislation is the level they can go to. That’s what we have to create now, this soft product support, because we’re a solutions provider not a metal provider, and after this there will be Euro7 and Euro8. We’ll develop, develop, develop our support so that operators can sleep at night and know that they are covered.

• SJ: How important are soft products to Volvo’s future?

HA: With soft products it’s the service, the spare parts and then we have the telematics, that’s how I would look upon it. If we start with service and spare parts, managing the service business, we have a clear ambition to grow in this area, and now I’m talking about the big city customers, providing more integrated services, looking at different service models than we have used in the past, from a European perspective. From a UK perspective, we want to be a frontrunner in services in terms of integration with our customers.

If we look on the telematics side, there is the current offering that we are putting in hybrids as standard. I think it is key that we can take this to create a platform that can help the customers to work in a more structured way with preventive maintenance, with driver performance and so forth. We think there is some real value to that. So it is an important part.

Soft products, here being promoted at Coach & Bus Live, are going to be a focus in future years.

• SJ: Do you have a view on shows?

HA: I think with shows there is a cost-benefit balance. Some big shows like Busworld Kortrijk are very expensive, so we are really careful in thinking through what value they provide. I would say that we need some big, regular shows to reach out to the market with our messages, promoting them, and also having a kind of a neutral speaking ground with our customers, so there is a definite value. Then you have to think about how many and how often and so forth because the costs are high.

• SJ: Are there any other points you’d like to make to people in the UK?

HA: I think the UK market is an important one for us. We have a long tradition on the double deck side and also on the single deck side and we see that many of the UK operators are very progressive in terms of adapting environmentally friendly solutions. The UK market is also a deregulated market. For me there are two really deregulated markets in Europe and they are the UK and Sweden – Scandinavia to some extent and we think that is exciting, so there will be a lot of focus from our side on the UK market.

• SJ: Håkan Agnevall, thank you very much.