William Haser is vice president and CIO of Lake Forest, Ill.-based Tenneco, a leading manufacturer of emission and ride control sytems. A graduate of Northwester University's Kellogg School of Management, he also holds a BS in chemical engineering from Cornell. He has been with Tenneco in a variety of positions since 1983.

What do you think is the biggest technology challenge in the aftermarket industry today?

Today there are more vehicle models being built with better quality parts, resulting in more SKUs and slower goods movement. This combined with the aftermarket's service model of having the right part to the installer within 30 minutes creates the challenge of managing growing inventories.

One solution is to improve the exchange of data up and down the supply chain instead of building this inventory. This can be accomplished by 1) adopting standard interchange methods and technologies that can be easily adopted by all players, and 2) ensuring that each participant in the supply chain adopts the internal processes required to compile and share this data with their partners in a semi-automated fashion. In North America, adopting the AAIA standards such as ACES and PIES are a great first step to overcoming the data interchange challenge. Internally mapping data flows and utilizing Business Intelligence reporting tools to consolidate all the required data in one place will help provide near real time accurate data for sharing.

Can you describe the scope of your EDI efforts with customers and/or suppliers? What have been the company's biggest challenges in utilizing EDI?

Today most of our orders, shipment information, and invoices are exchanged with customers via EDI. The biggest challenge we face is the number and diversity within our EDI supported transactions. Differences can be specific fields required, the values required in the fields in a transaction, or the communication path utilized to move the data to and from our partners. There is also an issue that EDI can be cost prohibitive for smaller trading partners due to the cost of setting up a new trading partner.

What should the aftermarket be doing to encourage further adoption of EDI? Are there initiatives underway currently that you think will help with this adoption?

There are currently initiatives underway to create more sophisticated mapping specifications that will allow trading partners to exchange the full diversity of data required in the aftermarket, without having to create and support unique EDI transactions for each partner/transaction combination. This should greatly simplify the effort required to exchange EDI data. It should also facilitate the ability of third party EDI companies to cost effectively serve as middlemen between data suppliers and receivers, providing the economies of scale required to reduce the cost of implementing EDI for smaller participants. As a member of the aftermarket, companies should participate in and support these developments.

Are there new business, e-commerce or supply chain technologies that you think show particular promise for the aftermarket?

I think the Web service technologies being developed really have the potential to allow us to capitalize on the promise of exchanging information for inventory, while enhancing the ultimate customer experience. These technologies should allow the installer or customer to select just the right part, source that part from the optimal location, and for the supply chain to decide if, when, and where to stock that part. Web services will facilitate the sharing of applications up and down the supply chain required to make this happen.