Cummins Indianapolis: The Business in the Building

In January 2017, Cummins will open its Distribution Business Unit (Cummins employees commonly refer to the business unit as simply ''DBU") headquarters in downtown Indianapolis.  Tony Satterthwaite is the President of this division within Cummins.  The DBU is comprised of thousands of sales and service operations around the world.

Tony took some time to answer a few questions about the DBU and its new headquarters.

Q. The DBU is a unit within Cummins, what exactly does it represent?

A. The DBU is 7,000 service locations, 16,000 people around the world, $6.5 billion worth of business to Cummins. I think the DBU is the most diverse of all the Cummins' businesses in terms of where we are, in terms of where our employees come from, right. Two-thirds of our employees are technicians. We have branches around the world. That's where most of our customer interaction occurs. Whether it's a branch in South Africa, the branch here in West Indianapolis, or a branch in Hawaii. That's where we deliver our value.

Q. What does the new Indianapolis office building mean to the DBU?

A. For me this headquarters represents kind of the end of the beginning. And let me explain that. DBU has been growing up and what most people may not know is we're going to move into this building just around the same time we finish the acquisition of all the U.S. distributors. And so this, moving into this building and finishing that acquisition marks a huge milestone. But I like to think of it as the end of the beginning, right. What happens next is what's really exciting and what this building represents for us is a maturation, a growing up of DBU. And in many ways, us getting a bigger profile.

Q. Why build an Indianapolis DBU headquarters?

A. One of the neat things about being in Indianapolis is we're closer to a major airport. We expect to have a much more diverse workforce here and I think that completely fits with DBU's approach to diversity and trying to be as global a company as we can. And so I'm hoping we can use this building to bring customers in, to bring our distributors in, to bring our employees in and say this is where we do our work.