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Dealers are reminded of their “Pot of Gold” at AED Executive Forum

PFW Password - fALL 2001 The theme of this year's AED Executive Forum was "Planning for Profits." The meeting, held in Chicago, went ahead as scheduled despite the events of September 11. The forum featured a full host of guest speakers and panellists ranging from Dan Kaplin (former president of Hertz Equipment Rental) economics guru Brian Bethune from Caterpillar to our own John Andersen, Vice President of Sales for PFW.

Discussions focused on key items such as the capital crisis faced by most heavy equipment distributors, continuing consolidation and after-market opportunities. John Andersen reminded distributor members about the "pot of gold" that each is sitting on. Distributors have now amassed huge volumes of information in their business systems over the past years. In most cases there are millions of related transactions that have been stored but never tapped. PFW is committed to exploiting this legacy data and enabling dealers' unprecedented views of that data. By using new tools like Management Central, mining that critical data has become as simple as point and click, enabling better decisions. Mike Marks from Indian River Consulting Group said it best: "You can't begin to make a decision about where to go until you know where you are and how you got there."

Everything was not upbeat. The word 'recession' was used more than once by financial experts from Peoria to Wall Street. But from this John Zoubek, AED President, gave us all a quote to remember: "Some of you are part of the greatest generation that fought the tyranny and evil of Hitler, and preserved democracy and freedom for our country and the rest of the world. I look around this room and see the greatest generation of the construction equipment industry. No, our industry wasn't victimized by terrorists. But it has come under the assault of a sputtering economy that has claimed more than its share of casualties. Perhaps no segment of the American economy has felt the brunt of the current economic downturn more than ours."