This week we’re live from the CVSN Executive Summit in Montreal, where CVSN named its President’s Award, Driving Force Award and GenNext 4 Under 40 Award winners, while also talking the future of the aftermarket and quantifying success. We also touch on VIPAR Heavy Duty and Dana’s new distribution partnership, Volvo’s upcoming vocational truck launch, more on the Decisiv purchase of KEA Advisors, good news for trailer orders and MEMA’s encouragement of its members to leverage AI to bolster operational effectiveness.
Lucas: Hey, everyone. Bienvenue and welcome to today’s TPS Weekly News Roundup. Yeah, I have to use a little bit of French because we’re, we’re not in my basement.
We’re here in Montreal, Canada, for the CVSN Executive Summit. It’s been a great two days here at the Summit. A lot of wonderful stuff happening, looking at how the independent aftermarket has grown, where is the industry going in the future, where can CVSN continue to help its distributors and its supplier members become stronger? All the stories from the Summit, be sure to go to the website, check that out.
We also have stories on CVSN’s three award programs: the 4 Under 40 Awards; the President’s Award; and its new award, the Driving Force Award. So if you want to know who won those awards, you want to know what happened here at the Summit, be sure to go to the website, check all that out.
Other quick rundown of the news this week, a lot of stuff happening this week, as you can expect when you hit the road, there’s always a lot of stuff happening. VIPAR [Heavy Duty] and Dana announced a new distribution partnership on Monday. This is huge for both sides. It brings Dana and all their market leading products to VIPAR. From the Dana perspective, they get another 850 points of sale across the VIPAR network. So a huge win there for both sides.
In the vendor space, MEMA had a Pulse webinar where they brought in some experts to talk about AI and implementing AI in your supply chain and in your parts distribution channel. This is a really interesting piece because the big focus in the webinar wasn’t just AI can make your business better. AI will make your distributors better. It will make your customers engage with you a little bit better because you’ll be a little bit more malleable to what they need. You’ll be a little bit more proactive in providing solutions. So, a really interesting piece there on why AI is important so you don’t fall behind. So you remain on the leading edge of the industry. You remain in front of your customers. Great story there. Check that out.
Couple other quick things. Volvo announced they will be bringing a new vocational Class 8 truck, the VNX, to the market on Oct. 14. Volvo will live stream that announcement. So, if you didn’t check that story out, go ahead and do that. Go to the website. There’s a link to the livestream in there. If you want to see that new truck when it’s released, you can do that.
Decisiv and KEA Advisors, we had last week that Decisiv has closed its acquisition of KEA Advisors. This week we had a follow-up with Keith Ely and Tim Hardin from Decisiv about how this is going work, about how the KEA Advisors business is going to fit into Decisiv. Check that story out if you’re a customer of one or both of those solutions and sort of how your business is, going to function now with the two under one roof.
And then lastly, trailer orders exploded in August. It appears that the order board’s probably opened a little earlier, but demand is also continuing to rise in the trailer space. That’s a good sign, 24,000 units last month. ACT [Research] announced that is the second strongest seasonally adjusted month in 43 months. So, whether or not the order board’s opened or not doesn’t change the fact that demand is where it needs to be. That’s a good sign for the trailer space.
As always, everything here is on the website. Be sure to check it out. Be sure to like and subscribe to these videos so you don’t miss anything. Be sure to subscribe to the newsletter so you don’t miss anything. Have a great weekend. We will see you next week. Thanks everyone. Bye.
