Datalliance, an independent supplier of vendor managed inventory (VMI) services, announced that Timken, a global manufacturer of highly engineered bearings, alloy steels, and related components and assemblies, has selected the Datalliance VMI service to support their expanding VMI program. Timken plans to implement VMI with their channel partners in the automotive, heavy-duty and industrial aftermarket businesses. The company will initially implement VMI with representative distributors in all three aftermarket segments, then will roll out the program to all key distributors in each of the segments.
“As a leading aftermarket supplier, Timken is always looking for technologies that that will help us strengthen our value proposition to our end customers and streamline the way we work with our distributors,” said John Ziemianski, supply chain manager, automotive aftermarket, Timken. “We recently implemented a standard ERP platform worldwide to strengthen our global capabilities and provide the foundation for strategic e-commerce solutions such as VMI.”
Tom Tecklenburg, director, global automotive aftermarket, explained changing industry factors that have put added pressure on Timken’s channel partner network. “Technology advances have fueled the pace of product change in our industry and accelerated the proliferation of aftermarket parts. As this dramatic increase in parts continues, we know that managing inventories and working cooperatively with our channel partners is even more critical. We need to take advantage of VMI and other systems to increase forecast accuracy and working capital turns. VMI is so important, because as it gives us the capability to proactively identify and satisfy end customer demand in this dynamic environment. We want to make sure that our end customers, the professional installers, can easily find and purchase the parts they need from one of our more than 10,000 channel partner locations.”
“Datalliance was the obvious choice for our VMI program as they are the VMI leader in our industry,” stated Ziemianski. “We needed a proven approach that could be implemented quickly. The software-as-a-service model was important to us [because] we do not have the resources to implement VMI internally. It also allows us to accelerate our VMI implementation and start realizing the benefits in the shortest amount of time.”
