Datalliance Adds Flexibility and Ease-of-Use Enhancements to Cloud-Based Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) Platform

CINCINNATI, OH--(Marketwired - Jun 16, 2016) - Datalliance announces immediate availability of the latest release of the cloud-based Datalliance VMI platform with a number of important new capabilities focused on enhanced productivity, flexibility and ease-of-use in several important areas. As with all releases, enhancements were driven by feedback from the global user community combined with Datalliance's 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 over 50 releases having been delivered to date.

Enhancements in this release include important new capabilities for forecast handling, shipment date planning, order worksheets and reporting. Highlights include:

• Enhanced forecast handling: a new option to configure a location to automatically use an external forecast when provided (e.g. third party retail data or customer forecast).
• New supply chain planning calendar: a new site closure calendar and associated capabilities that alert the planner to future affected shipments, and automatically adjust shipment dates when needed. Calendar covers planning office, ship to and ship from locations.
• Multiple order worksheet productivity enhancements: enhanced visibility and use of external files containing orders to be combined with VMI-suggested replenishment quantities; ability to easily adjust suggested order quantities by selected pack size; enhanced mass order launch capabilities; enhanced alert generation.
• New Distributor Profile report: a new report that provides an overview of key planning details for a given trading partner. This acts as a quick reference guide for planners and their backups.
• Federated authentication: compatibility with our customer's Federated Identity Management (FIM) to enable single sign-on in a complex enterprise systems environment.

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.