Pumped up.

• Author: Howey, Brian A.
• Position: Gas pump-maker Tokheim Corp.

Thanks to a back-to-basics strategy and some big deals, the Fort Wayne gas-pump maker is back in the black.

The destination for Douglas K. Pinner one day last November was the sleek, towering Standard Oil Building in Chicago. The CEO of Tokheim Corp. entered alone.

Pinner's mission was to arrange an alliance with the Fort Wayne-based gasoline-pump manufacturer. "Amoco had been buying from five pump suppliers," Pinner says. "They wanted to consolidate it to one or two."

When Pinner left Chicago, Tokheim had made the first cut. There would be an Amoco delegation heading to Fort Wayne for a full-day tour the next month. The Amoco representatives were greeted by an Amoco flag, flapping from the Tokheim company flagpole. There were 20-foot-long banners in the production area. Employees were wearing T-shirts with the Amoco and Tokheim logos. There were Amoco pumps coming off the assembly line headed for Florida.

"We laid it on the line to our workers," says Tom Fry, Tokheim's operations manager. "This was to be the single-most important visit to this plant. We got a wild response. What Amoco was looking at was not just a supplier, but a partner in product development and cost savings."

"Our people were charged up," Pinner recalls.

The result was a new alliance with Amoco, announced in January. "Tokheim will provide 100 percent of Amoco's dispenser needs in the United States," Pinner says, noting that Amoco's 3,000 gas stations could need $12 million or more worth of Tokheim equipment each year. The alliance comes on the heels of a five-year deal with Shell Europe announced in 1993 that could bring an estimated $72 million in sales over the contract period. Looming is a deal with Shell International, which could be as big for the company as the European deal.

Such news shows the company now is concentrating its efforts in all the right places, notes Raymond H. Diggle Jr., a close follower of Indiana public companies and vice president for research in the Indianapolis office of Robert W. Baird & Co. "The market is the big oil companies, not the Ma and Pa companies," he says, hailing the recent pacts with Amoco and Shell. "The key is to get some of the others, too."

And getting others becomes more likely with each deal Tokheim inks. "When you do deals with Amoco and Shell, there are spin-offs," explains Tony King, Tokheim's vice president for worldwide sales. "People like winners."

After a rocky decade in the 1980s, Tokheim has definitely taken on...