E-Commerce Programs

We’ve covered e-commerce in a variety of ways at NAPB, including in-depth looks at supply chain operations, catalogs and content, and dealer leaders. At NAPB 2025, we took a step back and discussed e-commerce at a high level in our “E-Commerce Updates” session, covering end-to-end OEM e-commerce strategies. This session demonstrated there’s an appetite to dig deeper into the big picture on this topic – e-commerce program managers and related teams want to better understand the detailed operations of other OEM offerings. What are sales strategies and growth goals? What do e-commerce customers want, and how are OEMs and platform providers working together to provide that experience? How are orders fulfilled, and what is the OEM and dealer role in this offering?

Free and Prepaid Maintenance Programs

Free and prepaid maintenance programs are on the rise – we’ve seen an increase in utilization for both premium and non-premium segments over the last few years. And the good news is: they work! We also see a clear connection between growth in free/prepaid maintenance coverage and customer retention. That said, there’s still a lot to be done to best optimize these programs. OEM surveys have shown customer reluctance to purchase prepaid maintenance during the vehicle sales process due to lack of clear value. Other OEM research has found customers who have opted in but are not taking full advantage of their programs. How can OEMs best address these issues? In this Focus Day, we’ll dig into the details of each OEM’s offerings – what is included, the customer journey, the dealer role in execution, and the impact on retention. As part of this Focus Day, we will focus some effort into better detailing the service retention piece, as this has historically been difficult to track.

Inventory Management

Inventory management is a topic so expansive, we find its best left to a Focus Day, where experts can gather and truly dig into the details to learn from one another. From new model parts forecasting to past model servicing, balancing service and inventory levels is a key challenge for all OEMs. Specific topics will be selected and refined by participating OEMs, though we expect to cover areas such as: inventory organization set up, forecast algorithms and metrics, inventory planning and deployment strategies, central node and global fulfillment, and order fulfillment. At the end of this Focus Day, attendees will come away with specific actions they can take to address key challenges and improve their own inventory management operations.

Parts and Contact Center

Dealer parts contact centers are a critical component of OEM customer service operations and dealer relationships. They are often the first place dealers will turn when experiencing difficulties with backorders or recalls. Following the success of the 2024 Parts Contact Center Focus Day, we’ve decided to offer this topic on a bi-annual basis. The 2026 Focus Day will highlight current best practices and anticipate how new technology will impact contact centers, focusing on topic areas of highest interest after our 2024 Focus Day. We will collect learning objectives and refine the scope and agenda of the meeting based on OEM input, but we generally expect to cover a wide range of topics, including organization and process setup, tools and systems, metrics, and future technology.

Retail Inventory Management

7/22/2025-7/23/2025

Retail Inventory Management (RIM) is a critical business tool used by most OEMs in the industry, specifically due to its criticalness to achieving high dealer off-the-shelf fill and ultimately, end-customer satisfaction. For this reason, we conduct the RIM Focus Day on an annual basis, and participants continue to see significant value in the increasingly detailed discussion. This Focus Day takes place over 2 days, as opposed to our normal one-day offering, due to the expansive and detailed nature of the topics covered during it. Exact topics vary each year depending on OEM interest levels, yet typically the sessions cover items such as:

Service Lane Technology

The Service Lane Technology (SLT) market never slows down. New providers, new dominant technology (or maybe just new, hot technology), and lots of new dealers on the tech have all driven the market’s growth. Due to the rapidly-evolving nature of this space, we conduct some sort of SLT touch point with OEMs on an annual basis. In 2026, this will be a “light” Focus Day offering – a half-day webinar (rather than a full-day, in-person meeting) focused on key updates and what has changed since the group last got together. Ducker Carlisle will conduct research into new providers and new technologies impacting the landscape that OEMs should be aware of. OEMs will share recent changes to their programs and success stories. This “light” Focus Day supplements the full deep-dive Focus Day conducted in odd years, ensuring that the group is always kept up-to-date and not left behind on industry trends and key learnings.

Supply Chain Leaders

Each year, we gather supply chain leaders for two meetings – one at the conference in the spring and another about six months later at this Focus Day. Unlike our traditional Focus Days, this session has more free-flowing discussion amongst OEM participants, with Ducker Carlisle facilitators guiding the conversation. The scope of this Focus Day is limited to a few key topics to drive deeper dialogue and extract more meaningful, actionable insights. Specific topics for this Focus Day will be driven by executive input following the NAPB conference, focusing on the highest-priority topics of the day. Attendees gain significant value in better understanding perspectives from their peers, talking through challenges and success stories, and making connections through ample networking opportunities.

Wholesale Programs

Wholesale is a topic that doesn’t quite fit into either our North American Service Benchmark (NASB) or our North American Parts Benchmark (NAPB) conference, as it most often spans groups within an OEM organization. For that reason, we’ve decided to cover the topic of Wholesale in-depth each year at a separate Focus Day. This will be our 4^th annual Wholesale Programs Focus Day, which covers both mechanical and collision offerings. As the topic is so expansive, we find that the experts gain a lot of value out of getting together each year to dig into the details of one another’s programs. Specific focus areas for the discussion will be decided at the close of the 2025 Focus Day, but we expect to cover topics such as: sales trends, dealer tools and support, program incentives, platforms and systems, and more. Each year, we will continue to conduct deeper analysis to form a comprehensive benchmark of program performance, supplemented with internal data to analyze the full size of the market and OEM share.