Representatives from two aftermarket manufacturers made their case for industry cooperation and adoption of standards as part of a presentation Monday, during Heavy Duty Aftermarket Week (HDAW) 2018 in Las Vegas. Organizers say the information standards will help improve the industry’s efficiency and ability to sell more parts.
The time has come for all heavy-duty aftermarket industry players to band together and “embrace the value” of a heavy-duty industry standard for product information, according to Terence O’Reilly, president and CEO of Pricedex Software Inc., which sponsored the event.
“There has been a lot of chatter in our industry about product information standards, and it has included misinformation based upon uninformed speculation,” O’Reilly says. “Some of that misinformation has promoted unwarranted fear and concern about the protection of proprietary information. As a thought-leader in the industry, we felt it was time to dispel myths about HD product information standards, and have the industry hear about this from some of its own players,” he adds.
David Durand, vice president, aftermarket, Great Dane Trailers, outlined what the standards initiative is not. It’s not a repository of commercial vehicle data; it’s not a central database of information that anyone can access; it’s not a project to develop a catalog, and it’s not an attempt to acquire your proprietary data.
“We all need certain information to sell parts [and] we all share it now; but, we don’t do it efficiently,” Durand says. “We need a systematized means to share the huge volumes of product information we already exchange but take out all the manual processes we go through to manipulate the data we do receive.”
Durand adds that these processes are slow, error-prone and a barrier to selling more parts. “That is the primary business we are all in – manufacturers, distributors, groups and fleets – selling parts; and why we should all be involved in agreeing upon and developing product information standards,” he says.
Don McEntee, vice president of marketing with SKF VSM USA, agrees, speaking of his own company’s struggle with fulfilling his distributors’ requirements for product information. “Today, we manage a very large number of different pieces of data to support the heavy-duty aftermarket,” McEntee says. “And, when you multiply out the number of formats in which we have to send that to our various distributors and resellers, it has become an expensive, time-consuming, and resource-draining task. We can do this more efficiently and devote some of those resources to other productivity improvements.”
But, McEntee says, there is a solution. The Heavy Duty Association (HDDA) undertook a feasibility study in 2016, which provided a roadmap to the development of product information standards and, in 2017, started the initiative to develop and implement those standards.
“They are doing so with a broad consortium of prominent heavy-duty aftermarket players, representing the entire selling and distribution chain, who are providing guidance and oversight to the initiative,” McEntee says. “HDDA contracted Pricedex, based upon their industry experience, to manage the project, and it’s exciting to see that the process is progressing exceptionally well.”
Durand adds that, “This is a process improvement that is good for all of us in the industry. It will not only improve our efficiency, it will help us sell more parts. More manufacturers need to get actively involved. This is something we need to embrace and support and we all need to encourage and solicit the support of our trading partners, as well.”
