VNA functions as a "Service Bureau" for the group of 49 Independent Allen Bradley electrical distributors.  VNA performs national sales related functions, which allows this collaboration to successfully bid national or multi regional supply contracts with Industrial accounts.

At VNA, we accomplish our mission and vision by aggregating Allen-Bradley distributors into a single sales solution for electrical and automation products and services, and offering the best local technical support in the industry.  Our Value Proposition responds to a segment of the national accounts market that favors local, technical expertise backed by a national fulfillment network.  We are sized and structured to have the flexibility and infrastructure to continually adapt to the changes in our environment.  This allows us to provide the lowest cost operation for our members and end-user customers.  These business elements require a healthy open dialog between customers, distributors, and manufacturers - VNA's management team uses a proactive "hands-on" approach to build effective solutions for customers and profitable business for its owner/members.

The organization's success in meeting this mission depends upon several important components which factors into our customer's success.

First, success depends on the discipline needed to selectively focus on appropriate opportunities.  We service industrial oriented end user clients only.

Second, our success is also dependent on our information technology infrastructure that not only provides core capabilities for a national account consortium but that also offers value-added services to its membership and customers to insure an overall reduction in costs.  By focusing on internal and external cost savings, we provide both cost effective and high value services ensuring that our customers will receive a strong financially driven sales and services portfolio from VNA.

Third, we continue to provide significant technical value at our customer's local plants while utilizing reporting systems that will successfully communicate our ability to increase customer productivity and reduce total cost of ownership throughout the customer organization.

Last, we have created an organization that will allow individual Allen-Bradley distributors to come together and provide a single national sales solution to existing national account customers and potential customers.  Our standards of performance are high and show a greater degree of uniformity of capabilities than can our competitors.  Our channel is focused on the industrial account.  They have all made tremendous financial investments in the means of technical staff, training facilities and stocking / supporting the "best in class" manufacturers who service this market segment.

Some of the basic functions VNA performs include:

• Leads National Accounts Sales Activities, coordinating carefully with the member distributors 
• Handles all contract development including pricing, proposal, and negotiations.
• Leads the contract implementation effort to insure consistency and utilization of best practices
• Build and "scrub" customer item catalogs and set up web storefront to meet the demands of the central purchasing buyer
• Enables access to e-commerce and procurement systems (receive orders via EDI, XML, flat file, email, http, etc. then normalize data into a common format and route to the appropriate APR distributor)
• Collects shipment and invoice data for building high quality performance/usage reporting
• Provides national account customer usage and transaction reporting

In addition to the above functions, VNA also provides its members with a host of data management and IT services.