BURLINGTON, MA--(MARKET WIRE)--Oct 2, 2008 -- Emptoris, Inc., a leading provider of enterprise supply and contract management software, announced today an expansion to its award-winning supply and contract management solutions, designed to provide even greater agility and actionable insights to companies looking to weather the financial downturn. The suite expansion was announced at the Emptoris Empower 2008 Conference, one of the largest user conferences focused on supply and contract management. The conference brought together hundreds of senior executives, supply professionals, and consultants to discuss supply and contract management best practices and strategies for addressing the challenges of an economic downturn.

"Economic uncertainty, globalization and the need for greater supply savings are driving a host of new challenges, as well as opportunities, for Global 2000 companies," said Avner Schneur, President and Chief Executive Officer of Emptoris, Inc. "The CEOs, CFOs and CPOs of leading companies that we work with have expressed to us a need for actionable visibility into their supply relationships and greater agility in their contractual relationships. Emptoris delivers on that economic imperative with this latest expansion."

"There is a quote from Jack Welch along the lines of, 'an organization's ability to inform itself, and then translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.' Well, I think that sums up what we've heard from our customers as well. 'Give us actionable information, give it to us quickly, and in a manner that we can easily digest and with which we can take action.' That's what this expansion of our suite is all about," continued Schneur.

According to a study conducted by the Economist, just one in ten corporate executives have ready access to the information needed to make important business decisions. According to the Economist, over 50% of corporate executives report regular concerns about making business errors or poor decisions specifically because of a lack of real-time, relevant information. Eight out of ten corporate executives rank improved information and data as the most critical factor in improving business decisions and performance.

Emptoris Suite Expansion -- Driving Actionable Visibility and Agile Contract Management

The expansion to the Emptoris Supply & Contract Management solutions provides more actionable insights and greater agility and contractual relationships. The expansion spans Emptoris' Spend Analysis, Sourcing, Contract Management, Supplier Performance, and Compliance solutions:

Driving Actionable Visibility

Emptoris announced several new capabilities to address businesses' needs for more actionable visibility.

-- Real-time Drillable Dashboards: An entirely new dashboard infrastructure for the Emptoris suite including real-time drilling capabilities which provide actionable visibility to "anyone, anytime, anywhere" in the organization. When charts and graphs are "clicked on" the dashboards the information shown and analysis "zooms in" on the item of interest. The new drillable dashboards are interactive and collaborative, and can be quickly tailored to job and domain specific needs. For example, a diversity manager can create a dashboard to monitor how compliant an organization is with the supplier diversity program; or the CPO can share a global performance dashboard with the CFO. Printable Executive Brief Books: With the expansion, Emptoris also offers new "click to print" capabilities for creating entire briefing books for executives. The ability to create comprehensive briefing books at the spur of the moment allows companies to be timelier in their strategic planning processes.

"Emptoris now provides actionable insights to anyone across the global organization. Static high-level dashboards limit an organization's ability to react to changing market conditions. When data analysis takes days or months to digest it has limited value. With this expansion, we are changing the old paradigms, and we are putting significant power in our customers' hands," said Ammiel Kamon, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Product Management, Emptoris, Inc.

-- Spend Enrichment Manager: Emptoris also innovates with a new Spend Enrichment Manager, the industry's first self-service enterprise-scale spend data classification tool. The Spend Enrichment Manager leverages Emptoris' rich vendor and item knowledge bases, sophisticated spend classification algorithms, and user feedback to classify transactions quickly and accurately. The solution processes information from multiple data sources including general ledger (GL), ERP, e-Procurement, Vendor Management and Contract Management systems. Emptoris itself uses the Spend Enrichment Manager to deliver its own spend analysis services. In addition, Emptoris is announcing the immediate availability of the Spend Enrichment Manager, to third party service providers, who are interested in providing spend analysis to their customers.

"Emptoris' Spend Enrichment Manager allows organizations to create a center of excellence for the enrichment and classification of spend transactions. It has proven to be particularly appealing to strategic sourcing consultants, who are now using this technology to deliver quick and accurate opportunity assessments to their customers," said Kirit Pandit, co-author of the book, "Spend Analysis: The Window into Strategic Sourcing."

-- Sourcing Desktop Intelligence: Emptoris takes the powerful analytical capabilities the solution is well-known for, and places new decision support capabilities into the sourcing manager's hands with Sourcing Desktop Intelligence. This new component is accessible directly through Microsoft Excel applications, an environment where professionals already work and analyze supplier and award strategies. Further, this tool provides powerful, yet easy-to-use statistical analysis of bids for identification of outliers, item coverage gaps, and evaluation of market basket and lotting strategies. Sourcing Desktop Intelligence delivers dramatic time savings to professionals who are trying to assess bid quality, supplier competitiveness, and next-round participation.

"With the Sourcing Desktop Intelligence module sourcing managers are able to make better decisions throughout their competitive events -- and, as a result enables companies to realize even greater supply savings," said Ammiel Kamon.

-- Contract Performance Visibility: The suite expansion also delivers significant advances in the area of contract compliance and contract performance visibility. The supplier's performance, related to a particular contract, is now directly accessible from within that contract. In addition, customers can now see historical supplier performance trends, receive supplier performance alerts, and analyze spending relative to contract all within the contract application.

"Having detailed supplier performance information, at your fingertips and linked to the contracts, allows for more advantageous negotiations and more effective contract compliance initiatives," said Marty Kelly, Global Director, Contract Management for Emptoris.

Agile Contract Management

Emptoris also announced several new capabilities for addressing companies' desire to have greater agility in managing their exiting external relationships and agreements. Companies increasingly need to quickly amend contractual relationships because of regulatory pressures, changing business conditions, and strategic decisions which impacting many of their customer and supplier contracts. In addition, contractual relationships in several industries are getting more complex, and companies require better tools to managing those complex contracts. The new Agile Contract Management capabilities include:

-- Mass contract amendments: A new capability which allows companies to quickly identify a large number of contracts that need to be changed or amended and with one click initiate the appropriate contractual amendment and re-negotiation process for all of those agreements. Examples of typical usage include the need to quickly re-negotiate new risk mitigation provisions into a large number of supplier contracts; or the need to quickly amend a large number of customer contracts to reflect new regulations for a particular industry.

-- Mass Contract Creation: Companies also require the ability to bring many suppliers, partners, or customers under contract. The new mass contracting capability allows companies to initiate the establishment of new contracts, in parallel, rather than creating them one by one. Examples of the usage of this capability include companies that may desire to quickly create a new business facility, which requires hundreds of contracts with known suppliers; or the acquisition of another company, which requires mass contracting with customers or suppliers who were effectively "acquired."

-- Contract Document Packages: As contractual relationships get more complex companies find that a single relationship is comprised of many legal documents. The Document Packages capability allows multiple legal documents to be reviewed by internal stake holders, presented to external parties, and executed together. This capability is critical for managing the complex relationships that are now appearing due to increasing business complexity and heightened sensitivity to risk.

"Companies today need to be nimble and quick to survive and thrive. These solution innovations and expansion of the Emptoris suite will help companies become more agile -- and drive even greater impact to the bottom line," said Avner Schneur, President and Chief Executive Officer of Emptoris.

Emptoris Supply & Contract Management solutions are already consistently recognized by leading independent analyst firms as the market's leading solutions. Most recently, Emptoris was positioned as in the "leaders quadrant" in the Gartner research report, "Magic Quadrant for Sourcing Application Suites, 2008" -- and received the highest score for "Current Product Offering" in "The Forrester Wave: Contract Life-Cycle Management, 2008."

For further information, visit www.emptoris.com

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