Synygy Makes Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance Easy; Most Incentive Compensation Plans Are Out-of-Control and Lack Visibility; And Most Companies Underestimate Their Exposure

Business Wire, May 24, 2004

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

CONSHOCKEN, Pa.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 24, 2004

Incentive compensation represents ten percent of the total payroll cost in the U.S. Yet even the largest companies muddle along, managing their incentive compensation plans using spreadsheets, manual systems, or custom-built applications so old that they are barely functional.

Research shows that managing incentive compensation using spreadsheets or manual systems is not only error-prone but also extremely limiting in documenting, tracking, and auditing payment-related activities.

"Incentive compensation is a greater risk than most companies realize, especially in light of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX)," said Mark A. Stiffler, president and CEO of Synygy Inc. "Well before the creation of SOX, Synygy helped companies put processes in place to improve the documentation, tracking, and auditing of their incentive compensation plans, and now we are helping them become SOX compliant."

Synygy's Enterprise Incentive Management (EIM) Solution supports compliance with SOX requirements as they relate to management of incentive compensation and performance management programs.

Synygy delivers a standardized, sustainable process that ensures SOX compliance now and as SOX evolves. By giving organizations increased transparency into accounting and reporting, it helps improve individual responsibility and the ability to deliver shareholder value. Synygy's EIM solution ensures end-to-end visibility while delivering processes and payroll documentation, audit-trails of changes and extensive reporting on financial transactions and internal communications.

Synygy helps meet requirements of Section 404 (Management Assessment Of Internal Controls), which explains the measures that publicly owned companies must execute to show their compliance. Synygy's EIM Solution provides:

-- automation of the entire incentive compensation process,

including data integration and validation, payment

calculations, and real-time auditing and reporting on

financial measures and payment history

-- a complete, auditable history of incentive compensation plan

management activity through audit-trails for every single

transaction and change to commission plans

-- built-in data management that tightly integrates with other

enterprise systems, enabling secure data transfer and

exceptional data integrity leveraging existing infrastructure

and streamlining the transfer of content and data

-- complete documentation management, through system-generated

documentation of plan rules, parameters, and processing

timeline with logs as well as attachment of approved documents

to each plan

-- complete blanket of security measures, through controlled user

access to information and role-based views to provide an

appropriate level of insight into commission payments and

plans effectiveness

About Synygy

Synygy, Inc. provides software and services for creating performance-driven organizations. Synygy solutions enable companies to better execute their strategies by "operationalizing" how they define performance, reward success, and deliver results. Synygy's award-winning Enterprise Incentive Management (EIM) solutions have been proven by independent study to pay for themselves in eight to nine months. Synygy's EIM solution was also recently picked as the top-ranked EIM product in HR.com's 2003 Buyer's Guide to EIM. Based in suburban Philadelphia, Synygy's success and sustained growth were recognized when Synygy was named to the Inc. 500 Hall of Fame, reflecting Synygy's fifth consecutive inclusion on the Inc. 500.