Success Stories: Holiday Rambler

Proving PVM's Ability to Achieve Breakthrough Value

When Holiday Rambler came to the Design Consortium, they wanted something new, something to shake up the motorhome industry in a big way. What they got was every firm's dream - turnkey design of a next generation product line which then leaped in sales from $6 million to $200 million dollars in two years! The major innovation, a drastically improved motorhome slide-out technology, the Suite Slide^tm, did shake up the industry and was eventually copied by nearly all competitors. But, by then Holiday Rambler had already captured the hearts, minds, and pocketbooks of the market.

This particular innovation was only one of many produced in this project. It was enabled by the design team's extensive understanding of the motorhome owner's needs gained through PVM^sm Stakeholder Research and Benchmarking. The design team went "on the road" living in a motorhome to learn the nuances of the motorhome lifestyle. They inteviewed and observed 120 motor home owners. Then they lined up 7 competitive motorhomes in a row and Benchmarked over 120 separate product interactions with each design.

Below: The PVM Method was credited for taking one Holiday Rambler product line from $6 million to $200 million in annual sales in two years and changing the RV industry in the process.

Next, a 16 member, multi-disciplined Innovation team was assembled. After a detailed review of Benchmarking results, this team tackled a series of highly leveraged Challenged Questions carefully selected because of the wide ranging value a creative design solution to each question would provide. Innovation Session results were then taken into Concept Development.

Concepts were evaluated first in scale models and later with a full size, 37 ft. mock-up constructed by designers from Bally Design Inc., a licensed PVM^sm design firm. After the winning design solutions had been confirmed by a new sample of mortorhome customers, Ward Engineering was selected by the Design Consortium to work with Holiday Rambler engineering and manufacturing to provide the mechanical design and finalize production engineering for a completely new line of motorhomes with 6 different floorplans.