While many people may be ready for precedented times, that's unlikely to happen any time soon, as the sessions at the Heavy Duty Aftermarket Dialogue ahead of Heavy Duty Aftermarket Week 2024 in Dallas.
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"We are living in turbulent times," says Mark Gottfredson, advisory partner of Bain & Company, a global management consultancy. "When you're doing a forecast, really the only thing that you know, for sure, is that it's going to be wrong."
He highlighted the major variables that face the heavy duty industry, including battery electric vehicle adoption, availability and supply chain constraints; e-commerce and omnichannel sales; rise of insurgents with new value-added services; government regulation; innovation in alternative drivetrains; autonomous use and adoption; and transport as a service.
In dealing with all of this uncertainty, Gottfredson says, traditional decision-making processes don't work very well. Decisions come out with the wrong priority and in the wrong order. Interdependencies and linkages between decisions get ignored. Flexibility and other options are undervalued in decision-making.
"Decisions are made incorrectly, at the wrong pace or in the wrong order, foreclosing too many valuable, strategic options," Gottfredson says.
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