Best in Class Companies Leverage Strategic Stocking to Accommodate Faster Service Demands

NEW YORK, May 9, 007 – Choice Logistics, the global leader in mission-critical service logistics and supply chain solutions,supports the findings in AberdeenGroup’s most recent research, Managing the Last Mile: Driving Effective Service Parts Execution.  The report benchmarks best in class companies that are effectively optimizing their post-sale service operations by leveraging service parts execution to meet increasing customer requirements for faster service. 

“The findings in AberdeenGroup’s report emphasize the need to strategically position inventory to accommodate the demand for higher asset availability,” said Michael Katz, CEO, Choice Logistics.  “Maintaining the right balance of inventory investment in the field through an integrated enterprise solution, as Aberdeen suggests, is the same methodology that Choice employs.  This research brings important new insight to companies trying to meet clients’ service requirements, profitability.”
 
In March and April 2007, AberdeenGroup captured 170 qualified respondents in a quantitative survey to evaluate the impact of effective parts execution and planning on a company's financial and operational metrics.  Questions were designed to determine the following: 1) importance of effective parts planning and execution to the organization’s overall financial performance; 2) major challenges and pressures organizations face in managing and improving their parts provisioning and management; 3) the actions and strategies organizations implement to improve the effectiveness of their parts execution; and 4) the benefits realized from these new business processes and solutions.Key findings include:

1. 64% of leading firms indicated that customer demand for higher asset availability is a top driver for improvement of service parts fulfillment.  Nearly a third of best in class firms are looking to leverage additional parts depots located closer to customer sites.

2. Leading service providers are adopting several actions to shorten the last mile of service parts fulfillment.  To get parts to customer locations, leading providers were twice as likely as others to leverage regional couriers and 3 times as likely to rely on third-party logistics providers to handle their service parts execution. 

3. Maintaining the right balance of parts on-hand to minimize stock out situations without carrying needless inventory can only be accomplished by rigorous adherence to proven effective and integrated procedures and the willingness to regularly measure and adjust those processes against changing business and customer demand.

4. Companies that implement standard processes across their enterprise, establish and monitor key performance indicators and adopt technology solutions to enable these business processes achieve significantly higher results than those who use ad hoc systems with limited or no measurement.  Best in class firms are more than 2 times as likely as all other firms to have enterprise-wide procedures.

Access the report directly at http://www.aberdeen.com/link/sponsor.asp?spid=30410696&cid=3976.

About Choice Logistics
Choice Logistics is the global service partner for mission critical logistics. With over 300 strategic stocking locations (SSLs) around the world and 24x7x365 logistics services, Choice Logistics provides customized, same-day solutions with an integrated approach to strategic inventory management. Choice’s people, processes and systems provide the speed and flexibility to address the challenges and opportunities to support leading companies with two- to four-hour parts demands.  Avaya, Cisco, EMC, Equant, Hitachi Data Systems, and others have selected Choice as their preferred global provider of outsourced logistics.  To learn more about Choice Logistics, visit www.choicelogistics.com; call (800) 593-2108, or e-mail info@choicelogistics.com.

About Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company
Aberdeen is a leading provider of fact-based research and market intelligence that delivers demonstrable results. Having benchmarked more than 30,000 companies in the past two years, Aberdeen is uniquely positioned to educate users to action: driving market awareness, creating demand, enabling sales, and delivering meaningful return-on-investment analysis. As the trusted advisor to the global technology markets, corporations turn to AberdeenTM for insights that drive decisions.

As a Harte-Hanks Company, Aberdeen plays a key role of putting content in context for the global direct and targeted marketing company. Aberdeen's analytical and independent view of the "customer optimization" process of Harte-Hanks (Information – Opportunity – Insight – Engagement – Interaction) extends the client value and accentuates the strategic role Harte-Hanks brings to the market. For additional information, visit Aberdeen http://www.aberdeen.com or call (617) 723-7890, or to learn more about Harte-Hanks, call (800) 456-9748 or go to http://www.harte-hanks.com.