Commentary: The Fleets Role in Strengthening the Repair Chain
Denise Rondini
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Denise Rondini
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Recently industrial distributor Grainger announced a new e-commerce initiative it is calling Gamut. Company officials said they did it in part to stem competition from Amazon Business, which is increasingly becoming a source for all sorts of things — including truck parts.
A quick search will demonstrate that you indeed can purchase parts for your trucks on the Amazon website. Of course, a closer look shows that you can’t buy all your truck parts there. Amazon is very adept at handling quick-moving, smaller parts that can be easily shipped.
You still need to rely on a local distributor for those slower-moving parts and large parts. While the slower-moving parts provide higher margins for distributors, they come with higher inventory holding costs.
So why should a fleet care about this? Because distributors cannot survive on the slow-moving parts alone. If Amazon continues to take an increasingly larger share of the A and B items, it is likely that distributors are going to find themselves facing serious financial pressure that may force them to close their doors.
Where will that leave a fleet when the part fails on the road? Without support from a local distributor to provide parts in emergency and breakdown situations, the fleet could find itself accruing more downtime until a part can be secured.
The point is, supply chain health matters to a fleet’s success. The supply chain is not just from supplier to distributor; it must include supplier to distributor and distributor to fleet.
The way things are in the truck parts business today, only two-thirds of the supply chain is involved in keeping it healthy. Going forward, everyone needs to take on that responsibility.
That means fleets need to sit down with their best distributors and say, “How can we work better together so that we both benefit?”
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