Cargo Control with Kinedyne
Learn about how Kinedyne continues to create innovative cargo control solutions, and what they can do for your fleet.
Episode 196: We are in Orlando, Florida at HDA Truck Pride’s Annual Meeting. In this episode, we talked with Kinedyne about their many innovative cargo control solutions, and how they are making life easier for fleets.
My guest today is Bob Dissinger, with nearly 40 years of sales experience, Bob joined Kinedyne as the Northeast Account Executive in 2003 and has served as the Director of Sales – United States since 2012.
Guest Website: Kinedyne.com
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Transcript of Episode:
Jamie Irvine:
You’re listening to The Heavy-Duty Parts Report. I’m your host, Jamie Irvine. And this is the show where you get expert advice about heavy-duty parts that keep trucks and trailers on the road longer while lowering cost-per-mile. We are at HDA Truck Pride’s Annual Meeting in Orlando, Florida, and we’re at the display, not really a booth. This is the Kinedyne display. And I’m with Bob here as the Director of Sales for the United States at Kinedyne. This is a man with a lot of years of experience, 20 years with our industry and almost 40 years in sales total. So Bob, welcome to The Heavy-Duty Parts Report. So I’m glad to have you here.
Bob Dissinger:
Thank you very much, Jamie. I’m happy to be here and excited to have a chance to talk to you and to your audience today.
Jamie Irvine:
Well, you know, we’re here with HDA Truck Pride’s members. These are a group of Independents. They are part of the independent service channel. What kinds of products have you been talking to these members about with your display?
Bob Dissinger:
So I’m glad you asked that Jamie. We normally would talk about our core products Kinedyne’s a best known brand in North America everyone pretty much knows, but this week we’re taking advantage of our brand new display truck here to show a couple systems that may not be as familiar to your audience, but that really are designed to optimize a fleet’s performance, safety and product damage. And it’d be the captive beam system and our cargo access, which is curtains. And then also the captive strap, which goes in conjunction with cargo access to offer safety to the drivers when they’re tying down a load.
Jamie Irvine:
Okay. And this is the thing, right? Things are always evolving. You need new products to be able to help fleets. You mentioned that there’s some impact of these new products. I heard words like safety and efficiency. So can you talk a little bit about the like economic impact that these new products are having on your fleets? How is that helping them with their cost of operation?
Bob Dissinger:
Alright. So if we really look at today’s economy, today’s situation where they’re economic with supply chain issues, there’s shortage of drivers, fleets can’t get new equipment because backlogs at the OEMs, you have rising fuel prices, and then there’s the safety factor, which always plays into it. You want your drivers to stay safe and all three of these will actually play in and help that fleet optimize their efficiencies to actually gain more to the bottom line. I mean, you could haul more freight with your drivers and less equipment, and that’s really important to the today’s fleet if you’re struggling to find that additional equipment and those drivers.
Jamie Irvine:
Yeah. I totally agree with you. I mean, the reality is, I think as an industry, we do need to do a better job of recruiting and retaining people, but globally, there is a challenge where there’s just not enough people available and our industry has struggled to attract people. So when you’re talking to a fleet and you’re talking about them in essence, getting more done with less, I mean that’s music to their ears.
Bob Dissinger:
Right? Absolutely. And we’re seeing it in the response to these products. We’ve had, you know, record orders this year for our decking system. A decking system. If you’re maxing out your floor space without maxing out weight, now you can take advantage of the cubage by putting a decking system in there, it offers the ability to carry more freight, but also reduces damage. So you don’t have your dock workers and your drivers stacking freight on top of each other and leading to the inevitable damage. Or you might have some specialty products, tubes, pipes, things that are more susceptible to damage, and you can put them up off the floor and away from danger.
Jamie Irvine:
Okay. So that triggered something in my mind too, with how dynamic things in our industry, but really in our society and globally, have been over the last couple of years. I know that fleets are always looking for opportunities to expand their revenue, right. And what I’m hearing you say is with some of these new products, you’re giving fleets more options, which is really a great thing for them.
Bob Dissinger:
Absolutely. In addition to the decking system, we’re showing our cargo access, basically it’s Curtain Side, but there’s two versions. There’s the traditional with the over center buckles, but there’s also our Kin Slider where you have track top and bottom, and it opens and closes pretty much like an accordion door. And a driver can basically with this system on a 48 foot trailer could open and close that trailer within 30 seconds. You know, that means more efficiency, they can make more deliveries, more loads and the advantages with something like it with the Curtain Side and Kin Slider is that if you’re delivering to construction sites and places without loading docks, and they want to load and unload from the side, this makes easy access to the side. Otherwise, if you’re in a traditional box, truck or trailer making deliveries, first in, last out, you get to that first delivery and someone showed up sick, now all of a sudden you’re either going back to take that first part of the load off or you’re having to load and unload it all day long.
Jamie Irvine:
We’re gonna take a quick break. We’ll be right back. Don’t have a heavy-duty part number and need to look up a part? Go to parts.diesellaptops.com or download the app on Apple or Android to create your free account. Looking for high-quality fuel injection for heavy-duty applications? Having one supplier for fuel injection allows you to better serve customers by providing them with a complete line, which increases your sales and profitability. Learn more at ambacinternational.com/aftermarket. We’re back from our break. And before the break, we were talking about some of these great products that you’ve been sharing with the HDA Truck Pride members. I wanted to get your thoughts on a couple things. So first of all, we all know the last couple years have been really challenging. What did Kinedyne do to really step up and support the independent service channel?
Bob Dissinger:
Okay. So Jamie, Kinedyne is a vertically integrated manufacturer of cargo securement. So we have several plants. Our primary plant is in Asia, in Anton China, but we also have a in Pratville and then we have some light manufacturing up in Canada. And we also have down at our company in Mexico. Being the manufacturer, knowing that there’s variations in demand for different products, we’re able to move our production schedules around to try to accommodate. It’s not perfect. We still have some struggles from time to time, but I think we’re better positioned and have been better positioned to keep that supply chain going for our distributors.
Jamie Irvine:
Yeah, that makes sense. And the independent service channel is such an important part of the trucking industry. When you look at where we’re headed, what kind of challenges do you see coming? Because like right now the hot things is like part shortages, but we’re hoping that that is something that will subside. And it’s kind of a blip on the screen when we look back. Right. But when we look long-term and what’s coming, like what do you see as some of the challenges we’re gonna have to face?
Bob Dissinger:
So for the independent distributor, I think the single biggest challenge that we’re facing and this has really been exasperated by the COVID and the supply chain issues are the direct sellers, right? People can go onto the internet. They can search cargo securement, and multiple companies come up many willing to just sell direct to them, variations of quality. You don’t really know sometimes what you’re getting, but they see pricing, they see availability, they can place the order and it shows up and they find that it’s easier to bypass that distributor, at least in that circumstance, it may not be the right move, but if you need product and if you’re short and then they go back, whether they buy it through online or they go back and then try to drive the price down with the distributor. So it’s a twofold problem there.
Jamie Irvine:
And you’re a manufacturer. So you’re selling through a distribution channel. You’re gonna have to be concerned with managing channel conflict. How does the independent side then overcome that? And actually, I kind of like a one A, one B question, as a manufacturer, you want people to know about your brand, but you want them to buy from your distributor, right? So how are you gonna work together to be able to get your brand in front of people so that it’s not just a price comparison, they actually know the differences in quality and what they’re gonna get out of that?
Bob Dissinger:
So we do this through training and education. We have multiple educational videos on our website to help educate the end user and our distributors on our products and how they work. We have an experienced sales staff that calls not just on our distributors, but we also will partner with them to go into the fleets. And again, you know, tell them what the advantages are of buying our product, buying it through the distribution and the advantages that come. And again, it’s, you know, if our distributor is carrying enough inventory and don’t forget our distributors carry multiple lines. So this fleet, it’s one stop shop. You’re not just buying cargo, securement from some obscure source online. You’re buying your brakes and chambers and everything else you need for your trailers and trucks through that distributor.
Bob Dissinger:
It’s timely service. You have someone to call that can come in and actually look at your equipment, make recommendations. They’re supported by our staff, it’s training on how to use the products. So if you pull that all together and we, at the beginning of this pandemic, one of our larger distributors, we asked them how they compete against the online. They said, we compete by keeping inventory. We keep the inventory. We don’t give our customers reason to go elsewhere. They call up, we deliver it. And that’s really the solution, is you have to be in front of your customer and you have to offer them the full service.
Jamie Irvine:
Yeah, absolutely. And it does, you know, to your point too, full service is going to include a digital sales channel, even at the distribution level. And I’m sure as a manufacturer, you’re looking also on how you can make your distributors more efficient and be able to buy from you. So we’re not getting away from digital, but in my experience so far has been that it’s not an either or, it’s not either you only do digital, or you only stick with the traditional, it’s taking the best parts of the traditional distribution model and marrying that with the full power that can be leveraged with digital tools.
Bob Dissinger:
And we’re working in that direction, we’re working currently on what we call our eCommerce platform to give our dealers the ability to go into our website, place orders directly through the website. And this will probably be early 2023 it’ll be ready, but not only can they do that, but they can place the orders and have them shipped directly to their customers. So it reduces that handling and streamlines. So it’s a quicker, order to delivery.
Jamie Irvine:
And at the end of the day, we gotta keep the trucks rolling. So however we can get them the parts they need as fast as possible, that is the game. Isn’t it?
Bob Dissinger:
That is the game. Absolutely.
Jamie Irvine:
You’ve been listening to The Heavy-Duty Parts Report. I’m your host, Jamie Irvine. We’re at HDA Truck Pride’s Annual Meeting. And Bob from Kinedyne was so nice to take some time to talk to us. If you’d like to learn more about their products, go to kinedyne.com. Links are in the show notes, Bob, thanks for being on The Heavy-Duty Parts Report.
Bob Dissinger:
Thank you very much, Jamie. It’s been a pleasure.
