‘He’s got Mack blood through and through’
Lower Macungie plant’s manager returning to Sweden, leaving behind a rejuvenated factory
Rickard Lundberg — dressed in all black, with a Mack Trucks belt buckle and a Mack buttondown dress shirt that conceals the bulldog tattoo on his right shoulder — purposefully walks the floor of the manufacturer’s Lower Macungie Township assembly plant. He waves to masked employees as he strides swiftly along a designated walkway painted green with yellow outlines.
Lundberg tries to spend a couple hours a day on the shop floor, the place where the 50-year-old’s career started in Sweden when he was 19. That routine hasn’t changed much since he took over as vice president and general manager of Mack’s Lehigh Valley Operations in October 2016.
But the walk on this Tuesday morning is one of Lundberg’s final strolls around the massive plant as he gets ready to return to Sweden around the second week of October. Lundberg and his family want to get closer to family members, whomhehasn’t seen since Christmas because of the pandemic, and he has another job lined up as vice president of powertrain production at a Volvo foundry. But he also sees this as good timing, having
just completed one of the tasks that Mack’s parent company, Sweden’s Volvo Group, brought him here to do.
That task, the $84 million Reborn project, made the 45-year-old plant more modern and efficient, while also signaling Mack’s commitment to the Lehigh Valley. Lundberg pointed out the changes during one of his walks, noting how the more than 1 million-square-foot factory is cleaner, brighter and more open, less cluttered without the imposing racking systems that were here when he started. An employee cafeteria was finished in January 2019, where Mack holds town hall meetings — before the pandemic, anyway.
Perhaps the highlight is that the chassis work previously done outside the plant has been brought inside, leading to a seamless assembly line where the chassis rolls over to engine installation, then is covered by a cab plopped over a truck’s guts.
“We had achieved what I wanted to achieve, with putting in place an organization where we are working cross-functionally, making sure that we are taking one step in the right direction for leadership culture — changing the expectation of what it is to be a leader,” Lundberg said behind a mask, pinched against a beard that has been growing since Christmas 2018. “We are here to support and serve the guys building the trucks on the assembly line.”
For Mack, the project represented a reinvestment in its manufacturing facilities. The Lower Macungie plant, which employs about 1,850 blue-collar workers and 370 white-collar employees, assembles all heavyduty Mack trucks for the North American market.
“If we don’t take care of LVO, we don’t take care of Mack Trucks,” Mack President Martin Weissburg said. “The calculus on that was pretty straightforward for us.”
Weissburg said Lundberg was crucial in getting the project done while serving on the Mack executive team, helping to mold the company’s strategy, planning production as it relates to market demand and discussing commercial topics.
Taking over for Lundberg will be Gunnar Brunius, vice president of a Volvo Trucks vehicle assembly plant in Sweden. The 59-year-old, who Weissburg called “one of the most senior and accomplished industrial leaders in the Volvo Group,” will start his new role Oct. 1.
The leadership transition will occur as Mack is seeing an increase in demand across its truck segments, a modest jump that started midsummer, Weissrg said. While the company is still not back to its prepandemic forecasts for 2020, the increase was encouraging enough for Mack this month to recall 230 plant employees who were laid off earlier in the year.
Lundberg said Brunius also is a “shop floor guy,” someone who will focus on getting people to work together and continuously improve.
“I think he will be a very good fit after what we have started here,” Lundberg said. “It makes me feel good that I know the plant will be in very good hands with Gunnar.”
But it still wasn’t an easy decision for Lundberg to return to Sweden, where as a 10-year-old boy he built scale models of Mack trucks. Andwhenhegot the plant manager job, Lundberg said it represented the fulfillment of a
“childhood dream.”
“I will never get as good of a job as I had during my four years here,” he said.
Many saw him as a perfect fit for the gritty 120-year-old Mack brand.
“I can promise you this: Rickard Lundberg will be a Mack guy until the day he dies,” Weissburg said. “He’s a Swedish dear friend and colleague. He’s got Mack blood through and through right now, I promise you.”
But he also misses his two older children, who are 25 and 27 and live in Sweden. His wife and two younger children, 8 and 11, have been back in Sweden for about a month, in time to start a
new school year.
He has plenty of plant memories — and walks — to look back on, however. Most of that comes back to the shop floor, where he enjoys interacting with workers and seeing them solve problems across departments, rather than pointing fingers.
On Tuesday morning, toward the end of Lundberg’s walk around the shop floor, his feet, if only for a moment, stayed planted. He watched as a completed Mack truck crossed the finish line and rolled into the testing area.
“That’s what it looks like when a bulldog is born,” he said.
But then, Lundberg was off again, quickly putting one foot in front of the other atop greenpainted concrete, waving to more employees as he flashed by one of the final times.