An agreement reached last month will benefit you – the independent truck parts and service provider – and the truck parts industry as a whole.
The Commercial Vehicle Solutions Network, the largest association of independent truck parts distributors, has decided to hold its spring meetings in conjunction with Heavy Duty Aftermarket Week, a conference that will now be an annual gathering of the entire industry, as organizers originally intended.
Because only a brief time span separated the two events – Heavy Duty Aftermarket Week is held in January and CVSN’s spring meetings were in April – attending both put a lot of stress on suppliers. Before a CVSN negotiating team began meeting with HDAW organizers in April, the association was considering holding its 2008 meeting in February. One-on-one meetings between distributors and supplier executives are a key aspect of both conferences. With the events held so closely together, suppliers were beginning to question why they should attend both. And while some CVSN members attended HD Aftermarket Week as well as the association’s spring meetings, most did not, Angelo Volpe, executive vice president of CVSN, told me. “It just was splitting up the industry,” Volpe says.
Combining the events was the logical solution. But it wasn’t easy. Two sticking points prevented CVSN from joining Heavy Duty Aftermarket Week. “Being able to retain our own identity was the biggest barrier we had,” explains Ken Duval, incoming president of CVSN and head of the negotiating committee. CVSN formed in 2006 – the first year Heavy Duty Aftermarket Week was held – from the merger of the Council of Fleet Specialists and the National Wheel and Rim Association. The new organization wanted to ensure there was a spring event that would focus on issues important to independent distributors.
The second holdup involved revenue. Joining HDAW as a supporter conflicted with CVSN’s viability. Marc Karon, a CVSN board member and president of Total Truck Parts, says the revenue stream from the event wouldn’t make up for that loss due to elimination of the group’s stand-alone spring meetings, which produced much of the money used to run the association and its initiatives.
To overcome the revenue hurdle, Karon says, CVSN will join the Heavy Duty Manufacturers Association and the Heavy Duty Distributors Association as an HDAW owner in 2009. In return, HDAW will gain a vital group of distributor attendees. Tim Kraus, executive director of HDMA, says his organization anticipates a 40 percent larger distributor population at the 2008 conference compared to this year’s.
As an owner and organizer, CVSN will have more responsibility in structuring and running the event. In addition to holding its regular spring meeting, CVSN will be in charge of the one-on-one supplier-distributor meetings, will help develop education and training programs and will organize task forces at HDAW that will report their findings at the association’s fall meeting. These task forces will explore such topics as employee recruitment and retention, dealing with counterfeit parts and the impact of the 2010 engines. By setting up the task forces at HDAW, the association will be able to draw manufacturers into them, Duval says, allowing distributors to utilize manufacturers’ knowledge and resources.
Manufacturers will benefit as well. CVSN represents some of the most powerful distributors in the industry. If you look at the top 50 distributors in the country, Kraus says, a large percentage of them are CVSN members. “They bring a lot of buying power to the event,” he says. Manufacturers will no longer face the quandary of showing loyalty to one group at the expense of the other. Kraus expects 35 to 40 additional suppliers to attend the 2008 conference. Twenty to 25 of those attended only the CVSN event this year.
The original purpose of HDAW was to pare down the number of industry meetings. Doing so saves everyone time and money, and with CVSN onboard, that’s now possible. The combined event will also bring the truck parts industry together in one place, at one time, giving it a stronger voice in government affairs and a chance to speak out on the many issues facing the industry as a whole.
