PeopleSoft to Deliver First 100-Percent Internet, Fully Integrated, Global Staffing Solution; PeopleSoft Staffing Built on Scalable XML-Based Architecture - Product Announcement

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, April 24, 2000

PeopleSoft, Inc. Monday announced that it plans to deliver PeopleSoft Staffing Front Office, the industry's first and only fully integrated, easy-to-use, 100-percent Internet solution for staffing organizations worldwide in Q3 2000. PeopleSoft Staffing Front Office will be the first of two offerings that extend PeopleSoft Professional Services Automation (PSA) into the staffing field.

The solution is expected to deliver significant customer benefits by integrating PeopleSoft Staffing Front Office's management of sales and recruiting functionality with a back-office product, also under development, for "pay/bill" processes that pay employees and bill customers.

Facing increasingly tight labor markets and aggressive competition, staffing firms require an Internet-based solution that reduces costs, increases efficiencies, enhances customer satisfaction and maximizes profitability. PeopleSoft Staffing provides those benefits, leveraging the company's heritage in easy-to-use, people-centric software.

The solution will take advantage of integration efficiencies to allow staffing firms to: -- Find, hire and assign employees to projects faster and at lower cost by providing accelerated recruiting through Internet-based applicant access.

-- Improve service by giving customers quick, easy access to the system - from anywhere at any time - to place job orders and monitor assignments and invoicing.

The integration between PeopleSoft Staffing Front Office and Back Office will allow organizations to:

-- Increase efficiency of critical pay/bill processes by significantly decreasing administrative processing times. In some cases, for example, weeks of routing paperwork through an office and double entering information into separate systems can be reduced to a few minutes.

"PeopleSoft Staffing has the potential to quickly transform traditional staffing firms into web-based powerhouses," said Joseph Liberatore, president, kforce Interactive Services. "The Internet has dramatically changed our business. By helping kforce seamlessly link customers, vendors and prospective employees, we expect that this solution can give us the tools to provide better service at lower cost and to succeed against a new breed of online competition."

Responding to demand from customers, PeopleSoft acquired a license to source code for the front-office solution from software vendor Prairie Development, Inc. (www.prairiedev.com). PeopleSoft chose Prairie because of its solid reputation and more than nine years of experience in the staffing industry. PeopleSoft is porting Prairie Development's EmpACT 2000 software to the 100-percent Internet architecture of PeopleTools 8.0.

The integrated solution leverages a PeopleSoft customer base that includes more than half of the top 50 staffing firms worldwide. Customers will be able to buy the front-office applications as an independent solution or integrated with the back-office application for a total solution. The solution will be provided as an in-house and a hosted solution.

"PeopleSoft Staffing will provide an unprecedented opportunity for staffing firms to integrate their front and back-office operations to form a single Internet-based solution backed by a premier software company," said Peter Kislowski, vice president of PeopleSoft Staffing Solutions. "We anticipate rapid adoption of this solution by both our existing customer base of more than 30 staffing firms and new customers that need quick implementation of a highly flexible and scalable platform," he said.

PeopleSoft Staffing is a natural extension of PeopleSoft PSA, announced in February 2000. Both solutions integrate PeopleSoft eBusiness applications to provide web-enabled, end-to-end solutions for effectively delivering services, maximizing profitability and managing projects and people - PSA in the consulting field and Staffing in the staffing industry.

The company soon will announce details of its staffing-specific, back-office product to be integrated with PeopleSoft Staffing Front Office.

PeopleSoft (Nasdaq: PSFT) is a world leader in eBusiness application solutions. PeopleSoft provides eBusiness applications for customer relationship management, human resource management, financials, and supply chain, along with a range of industry-specific solutions, such as PeopleSoft Professional Services Automation. For more than 4,000 customers, PeopleSoft solutions offer greater flexibility, rapid implementation, and lower cost of ownership. Customers include some of the largest multi-national organizations in the world, as well as small- and medium-size businesses. PeopleSoft Consulting is the implementation and solution deployment arm of PeopleSoft, Inc. In conjunction with its partners and 2,400 consultants worldwide, PeopleSoft Consulting focuses on helping customers achieve the highest value attainment from the deployment of PeopleSoft eBusiness solutions. Headquartered in Pleasanton, California, PeopleSoft (www.peoplesoft.com) employs 7,000 people and had 1999 revenues of $1.4 billion.