Datalliance Further Enhances Cloud-Based Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) Platform

CINCINNATI, OHIO--(Marketwired - Sep 29, 2015) - Datalliance today announced immediate availability of the latest release of the cloud-based Datalliance VMI platform with a number of important new capabilities. Enhancements were driven by feedback from the global user community combined with Datalliance vision for the continued evolution of the VMI process. New capabilities are available for immediate use by Datalliance customers and their trading partners at no cost, and with no need to install or upgrade software. Datalliance delivers enhancement releases three times per year, with nearly 50 releases having been delivered to date. 

Enhancements in this release include important new capabilities for product life-cycle management and assortment management as well as a number of new ways for VMI planners to better personalize their user experience for maximum daily productivity. Highlights include:

• A new 'master item' capability which can be used to establish and manage families of related items for replenishment planning purposes. This powerful new capability greatly streamlines product life cycle management in a number of situations. Two primary uses are for:
  
  
  • Evolving items with a series of superseding item numbers such as vehicle parts that go through design changes over time while continuing to be interchangeable
  • Rotating items that are replenished in cycles, such as consumer packaged goods that have different variations of 'base/bonus' promotional packages (e.g. toothpaste with free toothbrush, toothpaste with free floss, etc.)

This capability combines inventory positions and demand for all items in a family to influence replenishment planning for the currently shipping item. Graphical visualization of the information being used is provided to the planner for easy understanding and confirmation. 

• Enhanced assortment management that makes it much easier to maintain the details of product assortments within the Datalliance application. This capability is especially important for retail products such as apparel where assortments are a critical factor in replenishment planning.
  
  
• Numerous other functional and ease-of-use enhancements that primarily add fine tuning options to the solution's management by exception approach. For instance, new intelligence and configurability capabilities provide planners with added flexibility in setting alert tolerances, fine-tuning calculations like days of supply (DOS), and adding non-typical information in a self-service manner.

As with every release, a number of general technical and performance enhancements are also included to further support overall system scalability, reliability and availability.  

About Datalliance
Datalliance is the world's largest independent Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) service provider. Delivered as a cloud-based platform backed by extensive customer service, Datalliance VMI makes it easy for suppliers and their customers to establish sales and inventory management relationships that fully align business objectives, improve collaboration, and streamline supply chain operations. Datalliance manages billions of dollars in orders, millions of SKUs, and thousands of locations worldwide for leading companies in consumer, industrial and healthcare markets. For more information about Datalliance, visit www.datalliance.com.