Datalliance's latest update to its cloud-based Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) platform makes it easier for manufacturers of consumer or industrial products to manage inventory replenishment for retailers and distributors. These enhancements - driven by feedback from its global user base and Datalliance's vision for the future of VMI - focus on making the user-experience even more flexible and intuitive.

Because the Datalliance VMI platform is cloud-based, these upgrades are available for immediate use by Datalliance customers and their trading partners. Datalliance releases all platform-wide updates at no cost, and there's never a need to install or download software updates. This is the second of three major releases Datalliance plans for the year. Since Datalliance's founding, more than 50 releases have been delivered.

Highlights of enhancements in this release include:

• Order Workbench: New generation order worksheet with layout and content refinements as well as personalization capabilities such as filtering, column pinning, dynamic sort, user-selected grid data, tabs and other ease-of-use enhancements that improve user productivity in this primary VMI planner interface.
• Product Activity Handling: New generation user interface, process flow and resolution options for handling system-identified errors in trading partner activity reporting. Again, improving planner speed and productivity for daily tasks.
• Event Management: Enhanced event details gives users access to more information, and personalized user-views enable even more productive "one-stop" promotion event management.
• Master Item Management: Extended capabilities and enhanced user-interface enable more efficient management of product family rotations and transitions across multiple replenishment locations.

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

At its recent annual forum, Datalliance customers who had beta-tested some of the enhancements gave rave reviews. One user stated: "Datalliance is always doing things to further improve user productivity with process automation and user interface refinements. We always appreciate that, but they really took some big steps with this release - especially in the order worksheet where we do most of our daily work. Not only does it enable us to work faster, but it will also enable us to train new planners more quickly."