History

Coach & Equipment Manufacturing Corp. is well known for making the "sturdy workhorse" of the mid-sized bus industry.

Our bus building roots go back to the late 1890's, first as Whitfield Body Builders (1895) and then as Penn Yan Bodies in 1928, gaining a worldwide reputation for quality buses until World War II, when production switched to cargo bodies. After the war, the

former president of Penn Yan Bodies founded Coach & Equipment Manufacturing Corp. in 1948, with a focus on small buses.

Many of our employees have over 20 years experience with Coach & Equipment and bring a depth and breadth of experience to the manufacture of small buses. Our mission continues: providing safe, reliable, high quality buses.

In 2000, Coach & Equipment moved into a new, company owned 85,000 square foot building designed specifically for the production of small and mid-sized buses. This relieved production bottlenecks and more then doubled our capacity.

At the same time, we replaced or upgraded all machinery and equipment, designed new work stations and productions flows, and organized better material handling and housekeeping. We now cut metal to tolerances of 0.002" on a laser cutter, bend the metal in a computer controlled press break, weld in close tolerance fixtures, and paint in down draft paint booths with baking capabilities.

The quality and productivity improvements have been enormous. We are taking the next step by training all our employees in "lean manufacturing" techniques, in which the responsibility for quality and productivity improvements are shared by the entire team. These efforts have been recognized by our customers in a doubling of orders in the past 48 months, some of them on RFP's where quality, delivery, and service count as much in the evaluation as does price.