Emptoris Announces Emptoris 6 For Comprehensive Supply And Contract Management

Emptoris Offers New Contract Management and Compliance Solutions - Enables Customers to Accelerate Profitable Growth and Improve Compliance

Emptoris, the leading provider of Enterprise Supply and Contract Management solutions, today announced Emptoris 6. This integrated software suite brings two major offerings to market. The comprehensive supply management offering tackles the chief procurement officer's (CPO) cost control initiatives. The enterprise contract management offering targets the CFO's legal and risk management initiatives. Emptoris 6 also delivers a new compliance solution, SAP solutions integration, and high value improvements to existing functionality. With this release, the company announced the new Spend-to-Contract Compliance Fastrack service and the ValueNow Program. Spend-to-Contract Compliance Fastrack quickly delivers high impact savings compliance, and the ValueNow Program provides incentives for companies switching to Emptoris 6.

With Emptoris 6, Emptoris becomes the first provider to offer a comprehensive suite that can analyze all types of spend, manage sourcing for all categories and negotiate all types of contracts. The suite and individual solutions are offered as installed software or in a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. The Emptoris 6 suite offers:

• Seamless Supply Management Suite: the first suite with deep functionality and support across the entire supply management process including solutions for spend analysis, sourcing, contract management, compliance, and supplier performance management.
• Complete Enterprise Contract Management Solution: the broadest and deepest solution supporting all types of contracts including sales agreements and industry specific agreements.
• Turnkey SAP Solution Integration: delivers a turnkey solution that integrates source to contract processes to SAP's Materials Management (MM) Procurement solution, ensuring day-to-day operations meet the requirements of strategic contract agreements.
• Compliance Solution: the first compliance solution for monitoring and auditing regulatory and operational controls directly tied to the contract and supply management processes.

"Companies face many challenges today -- from the need to continually raise earnings, increased competition and the shift to global customer and supplier relationships, to growing contract complexity, and heightened government regulation," said Avner Schneur, Emptoris' president and chief executive officer. "To meet these challenges, the market demanded a broad, integrated supply and contract management solution -- and Emptoris 6 delivers. With Emptoris 6, our customers can dramatically accelerate profitable growth and ensure regulatory health while building self-sufficiency and delivering sustainable value."

"Supply Management, Contract Management and Compliance make a strong triple play that will appeal to multiple buying centers in the enterprise," said Andy Kyte, vice president and research fellow with Gartner. "Each one of them supports key initiatives for the CFO -- cost containment, process consistency and process auditability. All three from one source form an attractive option."

Emptoris 6 New Capabilities:
Emptoris 6 provides greater value to a wider group of users with the following new functionality:

• Fully integrated enterprise supply management offering: enables companies to gain enterprise-wide spend visibility, streamline the source-to-contract process, and simultaneously lower total costs and reduce risks by developing the optimal supply base. By linking spend analysis, sourcing, contracts, compliance and supplier performance together, companies can capture the greatest value from their supply base.
• Enterprise contract management offering: enables companies to gain greater contract visibility, reduce associated risks and create more profitable contracts. This comprehensive solution supports all contract types including procurement and sales contracts; all presentation and negotiation methods; all formats including external or "other party's paper"; all types of professionals; and all stages of the contracting process.
• SAP Solution Integration: leveraging existing "Powered by SAP NetWeaver" certification attained for certain modules in prior releases, Emptoris provides these market-leading offerings on SAP's NetWeaver Application Server (SAP NetWeaver AS) with integration to the SAP NetWeaver Portal. Customers can quickly and easily deploy these offerings in their SAP NetWeaver environment. Emptoris will continue to certify additional modules over the next six months. In addition, the new SAP Compliance Module seamlessly links contracts with SAP MM Procurement. This turnkey solution drives sourcing and contract decisions directly into the procurement transaction process, ensuring day-to-day operations meet the requirements of strategic agreements.
• Compliance Solution: Emptoris 6 delivers a new compliance solution that enables companies to manage and monitor financial, contract and procurement controls, ensuring the regulatory and operational health of their business. With this new solution, companies can better realize negotiated savings, reduce risks and lower the costs associated with regulatory monitoring. The new compliance solution includes:
  • Spend-to-Contract Compliance: enables businesses to track actual spending activity against contract commitments, identifying opportunities for rebates, price breaks, and overcharges and thereby preventing negotiated savings from leaking away.
  • Procure-to-Pay Control Monitoring: tracks actual spending activity against established financial controls to assess the effectiveness of procure-to-pay process controls; root out control violations and fraudulent payment activity; and identify opportunities for greater efficiency. The solution includes new compliance analysis tests examining the use of approved vendors, optimal payment terms, excess purchases, payment discrepancies, and opportunities to consolidate payments.
  • Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) 404 Contract Reporting: enables businesses to assess the effectiveness of contract processes and reduce audit costs associated with Sarbanes-Oxley reporting requirements. The pre-built Sarbanes-Oxley reports provide demonstrable proof of a controls process throughout all contracting processes.
• Integrated Portal and Project management: places all critical information at the user's fingertips and acts as a single launch point for all Emptoris solutions, thereby improving efficiency and ease of use. New features include a calendar driven view; end-user configured portlets summarize critical information and communication tied to ongoing projects, spend analysis, sourcing and contract activities; and portlet filters that allow users to drill quickly into activities requiring immediate attention.

Emptoris 6 contains many new features designed to enhance its industry leading solutions -- and improve the performance of the application at ever larger scales of usage. The improved functionality includes:

• Contract Compliance Checklists: for handling contracts negotiated on another party's paper. This enables all the business controls and intelligence of Emptoris Contract Management, even when the contract is negotiated on an external party's paper.
• Contract Risk Assessment and Scoring: the Emptoris contract wizard and configurator can now be used to assess risk and score contract quality. Routing and approvals can also be initiated based on contract risk or score.
• Supplier Consolidation Analysis: enhanced spend analysis reports highlight new savings opportunities for supplier consolidation across every commodity at the click of a button.
• Auction Savings Tracking: evaluates savings by item in reverse auctions by comparing the difference between the beginning and ending bid for each supplier.
• Best/Not Best Bid Ranking: provides a new method for sharing feedback with suppliers that drives competitive bidding by notifying suppliers only whether they are leading or not.
• Alternative Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Bid Analysis: compares multiple "what if" award scenarios that use alternative total cost models during the supplier bid process.
• Clustering: delivers greater performance, scalability and reliability, enabling enterprises to increase the number of concurrent users, the size of sourcing events, and the speed of analysis. New failover capability prevents loss of activity and data in the event of hardware failure.

Emptoris: Fastrack and Flexible Service

• New High Impact Compliance Service: To support the high demand for spend and contract compliance, Emptoris offers a new Spend-to-Contract Compliance Fastrack service. In as fast as 90 days companies can have visibility into corporate spend relative to contract commitments, enabling initiatives that prevent negotiated contract savings from leaking away. This offering combines a fast track spend analysis deployment and spend data enrichment, with the establishment of the contract management repository and legacy data loading, to deliver an analysis of existing contracts to spend actuals.
• Suite or Modules: Emptoris offers each of its solutions -- spend analysis, sourcing, contract management, compliance and supplier performance -- as an individual offering or as part of the integrated Emptoris 6 contract and supply management suite.
• Software as a Service (SaaS) or Installed: The company also offers each solution and the solution suite as installed software or on a Software as a Service (SaaS) basis. Individual solutions can be hosted differently, as the customer demands.
• New ValueNow Program: Emptoris ValueNow(SM) Program is a time-limited offer that provides significant incentives and migration services for companies switching to Emptoris 6. For more details on the ValueNow Program, please call 781-993-9212 or email info@emptoris.com.

About Emptoris
Emptoris is the world leader in innovative supply and contract management software solutions that empower enterprises to realize best value and accelerate profitable growth. Emptoris solutions are used by successful Global 2000 companies in every industry. Customers include American Express, Bank of America, Boeing, Dow Corning, GlaxoSmithKline, Motorola, Owens Corning, Samsung America, and Toro. For more information about Emptoris, visit http://www.emptoris.com/.