February 2024 new vehicle supply

How aligned are OEM new vehicle supply chains with their network strategies, including agency rollouts?

This webinar took place on 8th February 2024.

New vehicle supply has begun to normalise, even to the point of signs of a rapid swing back to oversupply for many brands, models, and derivatives. We are seeing networks having to address the consequences of the return of unsold inventory, and so the stocking issues and muscle memory on how to address them have reappeared for NSCs, importers, and dealers alike. At the same time, several OEMs moving their dealer networks over to agency contracts has created new challenges, since under agency, the OEM orders, owns and makes all decisions on all unsold inventory. And whilst NSC’s ordering the mix, owning the inventory, and deciding on actions to avoid overage and imbalanced stock, have all long been considered by ICDP to be the best practice vehicle supply strategy from the options typically available to OEMs, today such an approach remains an unusual when implemented within a franchise system: however, as our examples demonstrate, even within a franchise system, there are examples of such successful adoption of approaches to new vehicle supply that can deliver better outcomes, more effective in meeting customer needs, and more efficient in terms of retained margin, direct and indirect costs. In this webinar, we shall look at the many elements and phases within new vehicle supply chains, from product offering, sales and inventory planning, order and inventory pipeline management, through to customer ordering, channel design, and inventory management, and consider anonymous examples of successful alignment of each supply component to OEM and NSC network strategies, including where omnichannel networks have deployed, or are deploying, agency rollouts.