Timken Investing $22 Million in New Selling Support Infrastructure

NORTH CANTON, Ohio, July 9, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- The Timken Company (NYSE: TKR; www.timken.com) is investing $22 million in new customer and sales management tools, designed to improve the customer experience through increased sales force effectiveness.

"Timken is well-recognized in the marketplace for its know-how, engineering skills and service support," said Richard G. Kyle, president and chief executive officer of Timken. "We invest heavily in developing the best and most technically qualified sales force in our industry and our people are highly respected by our customers.   

"The result is a highly collaborative technical selling team, focused on developing solutions to industry's most challenging friction management and power transmission applications," said Kyle, "and that puts our technical and application resources in high demand both in the field and at our customers' design centers."  Fifty percent of Timken's professional employees are engineers by training or trade.  

Part of the company's previously announced DeltaX Initiative, the new XSell platform leverages the SAP infrastructure Timken deployed enterprise-wide over the past several years. It will provide the global sales team with new customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities as well as more consistent, mobility-enabled sales processes and business tools. 

At the same time, the company expects to deploy a best-in-class quotation management module to more quickly respond to market opportunities and accelerate the growth of its products among existing and new customers. Development is well underway, with initial phases launching by fourth quarter 2014 and then rolling out across the company's sales and support teams in early 2015.  

"We're excited to put these new tools in the hands of our sales force," said Hans Landin, product line executive of power transmission and engineering systems for Timken. "With this investment, we anticipate a significant increase in the effectiveness of our sales force. This will come through automating many of the more routine sales processes, which will free the team to spend more quality time collaborating with Timken customers to make the world's industry work better." 

"Taken together with the new product line growth streams we announced earlier," said Kyle, "we're confident in our ability to grow by creating additional value for our customers and strengthening our competitiveness."

About The Timken Company
The Timken Company (NYSE: TKR; www.timken.com) designs, engineers, manufactures and markets Timken^® bearings, transmissions, gearboxes, chain and related products, and offers a spectrum of power system rebuild and repair services around the world. The leading authority on tapered roller bearings, Timken today applies its deep knowledge of metallurgy, tribology and power transmission across the broad spectrum of bearings and related systems to improve the reliability and efficiency of machinery and equipment all around the world. Known for its quality products and collaborative technical sales model, Timken posted $3 billion in sales in 2013 (excluding Steel business sales).  With approximately 17,000 people operating from 28 countries, Timken makes the world more productive and keeps industry in motion.

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SOURCE The Timken Company