Haldex Saves Time and Effort with Datalliance VMI

CINCINNATI, OH. Sept. 29, 2008 - Datalliance, the leading independent provider of Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) and other e-commerce services, announced today that Haldex Group, a leading provider of vehicle technology solutions for the global vehicle industry, has successfully implemented the Datalliance VMI service in eight weeks.

Initially, Haldex thought the best way to implement VMI was to install and operate an in-house system. Bryan Long, Haldex Business Development Program Manager, recalls the problems with that early approach, “We selected a commercial VMI software package to be implemented on our in-house servers. Before bringing up any distributors, we had to install and test the software and try to build internal technical expertise specific to the software package. This time was really wasted in our effort to get VMI up and running with key distributors. In the end, we concluded that we were spending way too much time managing and maintaining our VMI system rather than focusing on developing our business relationships and growing sales with our key distributors.”

When Haldex investigated how other companies were doing VMI, they found that many suppliers and distributors were using Datalliance VMI. Long states, “We discovered that Datalliance is the most widely accepted and proven VMI service in our industry.” Several of Haldex’s key customers also supported the selection of Datalliance, as they were using it with other suppliers.

Moving to the Software as a Service (SaaS) model used by Datalliance was a significant decision factor for Haldex. “The SaaS approach made a lot of sense to us,” says Long. “Because Datalliance is a service, we don’t have to deal with all the issues of managing and maintaining the software and the associated data. This has eliminated our need for an internal IT resource dedicated to VMI system support and allowed us to focus on getting VMI up and running with key distributors. Adding a new distributor to Datalliance now takes minimum time and effort. Datalliance works with us to load the needed distributor data. They have the specific processes and procedures, and the experience from doing this many times over, to do it quickly and efficiently. We can now get a new distributor up and running on Datalliance VMI in half the time it took with our previous VMI environment. With Datalliance, their VMI experts do most of the work which greatly reduces our effort.”

Haldex and their distributors are already realizing substantial results from VMI now that Haldex has moved to Datalliance. “A good example of the potential of VMI is what we’ve been able to do with Point Spring Company, one of our primary distributors,” explains Long. “In less than a year we’ve increased sales 33%, expanded our product offering carried by Point Spring by 61%, and increased their inventory turns 23%. These are exactly the results we were looking for with VMI.”