ProClarity's Enterprise Analytics Grow Revenue and Reduce Costs for Leading Retailers and Consumer Packaged Goods Companies

Business Wire, April 8, 2003

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

BOISE, Idaho--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 8, 2003

ProClarity Continues to Enhance Business Productivity By Improving the

Decision-Making Process for Retail and CPG Organizations to Help

Streamline Operations and Increase Consumer Loyalty

ProClarity Corporation, a leading provider of innovative analytic solutions for the enterprise, announced today the major success its award winning ProClarity product family has realized within the retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketplace. Taking advantage of its comprehensive analytic and collaborative capabilities and quick start-up time, retailers and CPG firms are turning to ProClarity to align their organizations, connect disparate databases and enhance the decision making processes throughout operations, sales and marketing. ProClarity recently secured a number of new customers, including some of the world's leading retailers and CPG firms, such as Chiquita, CompUSA, Harrods, The Home Depot, Pennzoil QuakerState, PepsiCo, Reckitt Benckiser and Rite Aid.

"The retail and CPG segments are tremendously competitive markets characterized by low margins, high volume and increasing pressure throughout channels to retain consumers," said Jeff Roster, Senior Analyst Global Industries -- Retail, Gartner DataQuest. "Analytics offer these organizations an enormous opportunity for aligning operations, enhancing business performance, efficiency and competitive advantage."

Within the retail and CPG marketplace, industry leaders are in constant competition to increase their share of the consumer's wallet and seek opportunities to expand profit margins. With ProClarity as the foundation of their analysis and decision making system, customers are better equipped to understand changes as they occur and react to them quickly. Implemented throughout an organization, ProClarity enables its customers to realize their competitive advantages. For example, the new ProClarity Selector makes building and sharing sophisticated analyses such as category and brand management, market basket analysis and promotions analysis easy. In addition, ProClarity helps solve other key issues facing CPG firms and retailers today, such as inventory management, product profitability and price optimization, merchandising effectiveness, store format and mix effectiveness, shrinkage and employee fraud and supply chain performance.

For example, the Latin American Division of Chiquita, the world's #1 producer, marketer, and distributor of bananas, has adopted ProClarity's analytic tools to create a custom web-based application for monitoring the four key metrics driving its business. ProClarity's customized dashboard application is easy-to-use and navigate and provides facilities to aid in decision making regarding production averages and other key indicators across all Latin American operations and between divisions -- information that was nearly impossible to gather and analyze prior to ProClarity.

"We had a real problem with consolidating and comparing information from all divisions in different Latin American countries prior to ProClarity," notes Rommel Bocker, IT leader for developer and data administration in Chiquita's Costa Rica location. "We needed to be able to compare indicators between locations and divisions, like cost, production, and quality information. Executives needed information in order to make decisions such as whether to launch new products, and it was important in helping create competitiveness in the divisions. Now, if executives or managers see a red indicator for cost, they can drill down and see which farm is presenting the problem so it can be corrected immediately."

"ProClarity has quickly become the de facto analytic standard for the retail and CPG market as our technology has proven to make our customers more effective, productive, profitable and successful in key facets of their business," said Clay Young, vice president of marketing for ProClarity Corporation. "Both retail and CPG represent intensely competitive markets that require our customers to react on a timely basis to changes. By leveraging the ProClarity Analytics Platform and Selector, customers are able to empower their organization at all levels with a customized solution that allows them to understand their business, respond to the competitive environment and implement best practices throughout their decision making community."

About ProClarity Selector

The new ProClarity(R) Selector is particularly well-suited for retail and CPG firms, as it builds on ProClarity's capability to do sophisticated analysis. It provides an easy-to-use, menu driven interface for building category, inventory or promotional campaign analyses, without any knowledge of the underlying database query language, making it ideal for business decision makers in retail and CPG firms around the world. Through a simple series of steps analysts can quickly navigate into and isolate a relevant subset of data. A comprehensive set of comparison, filtering and selection capabilities can then be used to spot meaningful trends and patterns -- enabling timely, fact-based business decisions. Collaborative functions enable an enterprise to easily propagate the expertise of a few individuals to develop and centrally share company-wide best practices that improve decision-making. Uniform definitions of performance measures promote alignment of organizational goals -- the net result -- significantly enhanced business productivity. Results of the analyses can be saved on the ProClarity(R) Analytics Server for sharing with other users. The sharing is enabled as a specific dataset or as a series of reusable business logic.