PECHINEY CAPITALIZES ON APRISO SOFTWARE FOR NEW, "TOTAL MANUFACTURING" SOLUTION

French Aluminum Giant Gains Workflow Automation, Real Time Visibility and Control, Quality Management, Materials Traceability, and Labor Tracking from Single, Integrated Software Suite

(Long Beach, CA and Rugles, France - October 28, 2003) - Apriso Corporation, the leader in "bottom-out" enterprise software, announced today that it has implemented at French aluminum manufacturer Pechiney (PECH.PA; NYSE:PY) a complete, real-time manufacturing software application suite that automates all of the various components of its manufacturing operations at Pechiney's Rugles, France mill. The plant, which is operated by the Pechiney Rhenalu subsidiary, is a state-of-the-art rolling mill that ships over €100 million annually in aluminum strip and foil, principally for packaging applications. This disclosure accompanies Apriso's announcement, also today, of the release of its FlexNet® 2003 Suite of enterprise software applications (see "New Software Makes 'Dell' Business Model Possible for Any Industry, Company," October 28, 2003).

Pechiney is the fifth largest producer of aluminum in the world, and second in Europe, with annual sales in excess of €11.9 billion (2002).

"Pechiney Rugles is representative of a significant number of high-profile manufacturing operations around the world," said Adam Bartkowski, president and CEO of Apriso. "They have a world-class manufacturing capability that has, until recently, been operated completely without the benefit of enterprise software at the manufacturing level." According to Bartkowski, Pechiney utilized a series of ad hoc systems for production, monitoring, and quality control that were based mainly upon paper-based transactions "glued together" by massive Excel® spreadsheets. "They are not to be faulted," said Bartkowski, "because until recently, no end-to-end, commercial, integrated software solution has been available for global, enterprise-class manufacturers."

Bartkowski's company offers a new type of enterprise software that differs substantially from more classical, planning-based systems such as ERP (enterprise resource planning), in that it is designed to coordinate in real-time the tens or hundreds of thousands of "events" that occur in a production facility nearly continuously, while at the same time directing the execution of process steps, monitoring the performance of machines and workers, recording detailed historical information, and providing real-time performance information to both workers and management. This event-driven, Web-services-based model, which according to Bartkowski is unprecedented in enterprise software, is the foundation for the software suite installed at Pechiney.

"We had several aggressive goals that we wished to achieve," said Marc Vincent, project leader at the Rugles plant. "First, we wanted instantaneous visibility and control over every operation in production, including quantities, quality, and process values; second, we wanted 100 percent material traceability including product quality; third, we needed visibility into the performance, use, and maintenance parameters for our production machines; fourth, we wanted real-time tracking of every operational process; fifth, we wanted to track labor; and finally, we wanted to be able to continuously generate KPIs (key performance indicators) at various levels of detail so that every worker — and manager — could track their own performance and make the best decisions." And, if this weren't enough, added Vincent, the systems had to be intuitive and easy to use for line workers on the shop floor, and had to provide signals and feedback anywhere value-added actions could occur. "It was a tall order," said Vincent. Key to the decision to use Apriso, he added, was its ability to easily interface to Pechiney's SAP R/3 ERP installation, as well as other systems such as ASP or PLC. "As our plant has one of the most complete implementations of SAP R/3 within Pechiney, this was a very important criteria," added Vincent.

Apriso's software suite, which is marketed under the FlexNet brand, was selected because it uniquely fit this bill. FlexNet is a family of nearly 30 real-time, collaborative, Web-based applications that integrate all of the components of manufacturing and distribution operations — people, machines, material and processes — into an end-to-end infrastructure that is virtually "plug and play."

For each of the production, logistics, quality, and asset management operations one finds in a modern global manufacturer, FlexNet has numerous "process aware" workflow managers that can be tailored — by the users themselves, if necessary — to the specifics of each plant process. Supporting that are a process builder, for defining and tailoring such processes, a machine integrator, for tying each application to any machine, data-exchange modules for defining real-time interfaces to ERP systems such as SAP R/3 or Oracle 9.2i, supervisor portals, and real-time performance dashboards, for immediate monitoring and control.

In the case of Pechiney Rugles, FlexNet provided its Machine Integrator, Process Builder, SAP R/3 Interface, Workflow Manager, Network Manager, Material Manager, Process Quality Manager, Time Manager (for labor), Production Manager, Label Manager, and Supervisor Portal modules. Apriso was selected over would-be competitors, said Bartkowski, because of the scope of its offering combined with its unique technology. "FlexNet is the only event-driven enterprise software suite in existence," he stated, "and the single most comprehensive enterprise software implementation of a 100 percent Web-services-based architecture in the world. Both are a requirement if companies like Pechiney wish to institutionalize best practices."

About Apriso
Apriso is the pioneer of a significant, new class of enterprise software that for the first time enables corporations to define, operate, and monitor supply, production and distribution processes in real time, without limits. Using an event-driven, distributed services model, Apriso's software provides such fine-grained visibility and control of both execution processes and key performance indicators that it is an ideal platform for accomplishing the most pressing business initiatives of today: compliance, product genealogy, in-line production sequencing, real-time, RFID-based asset management, lean supply, successive refinement (kaizen), six-sigma quality levels, demand-driven supply (the "Dell" model), and the adaptive enterprise.

Apriso's software, known as FlexNet®, integrates quickly, easily and naturally into an enterprise's existing software infrastructure, and effectively extends the scope of systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) into the furthest reaches of the extended production and supply network, as required. But unlike these systems, that are based upon a top-down, plan-driven operations orientation, Apriso's event-driven, process-based architecture accommodates any operational model that is based upon real-time collaboration between execution processes, real-time visibility into performance, or the requirement to define, refine, or immediately control workflows throughout the enterprise, and across borders.

Apriso was founded in 1992, and now operates in 11 countries across the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. World headquarters are in Long Beach, California. Apriso's rapidly-growing customer base of more than 140 customers and over 400 installations worldwide includes such high-profile, global companies as General Motors, Lear, Honeywell, Microsoft, Merck, Lockheed Martin, ITT, Baker Hughes, Halliburton, International Paper, Rubbermaid, Matsushita Avionics Systems, Saint-Gobain, Pechiney, and British American Tobacco.

The company has received a total of $20.9 million in two rounds of venture funding. Investors include Wall Street Technology Partners LP, CMEA Ventures, LogiSpring Investment Fund, SAP Ventures, and Brentwood Venture Capital.


See also today:

"FlexNet Software Delivers Broad-based Lean Supply, Compliance, RFID Solutions", October 28, 2003
"New Software Makes 'Dell' Business Model Possible for Any Industry, Company", October 28, 2003

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