August 30, 2005

Seeburger Inc. announces today that its B2B Gateway is now processing more than 1,000,000 Web EDI and vendor-managed inventory messages every month for SupplyOn, the largest Internet marketplace in the automotive industry.

The volume of transactions has doubled over the last two quarters as both buyers and suppliers have expanded their use of the SupplyOn platform to replace expensive and inefficient paper and fax communications.

Part of the increase stems from rising activity in North America as the five European-based Tier 1 buying organizations that partnered to build the platform have begun extending use of the system to their U.S. and Canadian operations. SupplyOn is continuing to expand in North America and recently added a new sales director to assist in bringing more North American buyers and suppliers online.

"We are expanding rapidly, and the Seeburger B2B Gateway is handling the increased throughput and associated message translation without any slowdown or interruption in service," said John Kay, President, SupplyOn North America. "This is vital to fulfilling our mission of providing smooth and trouble-free data exchange to facilitate procurement and other supply chain management functions for automotive organizations of all sizes."

SupplyOn was formed by Bosch, Siemens VDO Automotive, INA, Continental, and ZF in cooperation with SAP AG to provide integrated electronic solutions for supply chain management as well as sourcing, cross-company product engineering, and quality management between customers and suppliers.

The platform is designed to speed internal processes and reduce costs by eliminating manual document handling as well as errors caused by transferring data between incoming paper documents and internal business systems.

Seeburger's business integration technology powers the platform's two supply chain management applications: SupplyOn WebEDI, which currently supports the electronic exchange of delivery instructions, delivery and transport data, credit notes, stock movements, invoices and remittance advices.

The company also offers SupplyOn Vendor-Managed Inventory, which provides comprehensive functionality enabling suppliers to monitor customers' inventory levels by plant and part number to provide flexible parts delivery based on actual usage patterns.

Seeburger's B2B Gateway handles data transport, message translation and monitoring services to ensure smooth data flow and provide message tracking capabilities. Data exchange is handled in a securely encrypted form between the ERP systems employed by purchasers and suppliers via a standardized platform.

"We are ramping up to use SupplyOn's VMI application with an initial group of 75 suppliers in North America, and eventually we will roll it out to all 800 suppliers that we do business with here," said Todd Pronger, Manager of Corporate Logistics, Bosch North America.

"This will not only give us all of the benefits of VMI but also give our suppliers a single Web portal for accessing other functions such as online bidding tools and the data on which we base our performance reviews. SupplyOn offers a one-stop shop that simplifies information exchange for the entire supply chain."

Seeburger's B2B Gateway is a comprehensive and cost-effective business integration platform designed to automate trading relationships throughout the supply chain.

It accommodates all industry and regional-specific data standards and communications protocols, and it can be deployed two to three times faster than other solutions through a broad range of processes and components preconfigured for different industries and B2B/EDI standards.

The solution is also the only middleware capable of integrating 100% of an organization's applications and trading partners, including smaller customers and suppliers that still do business on paper.

Seeburger offers special solutions that automate document exchange via email, Web portal, and fax in order to extend connectivity to smaller trading partners that are not electronically enabled.

Source: Seeburger Inc.