CONCENTRA LAUNCHES SELLINGPOINT INDUSTRIAL; The First Consultative Selling System For Industrial Products Companies.

DCI Field & Sales Force Automation Expo, BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Sept. 11, 1996--Concentra Corporation (Nasdaq: CTRA) today introduced SellingPoint Industrial, the first consultative selling system uniquely designed to meet the needs of Industrial Products companies that sell custom-configured products. Unveiled at DCI's Field & Sales Force Automation Exposition, SellingPoint Industrial is the first in a series of vertically-focused consultative selling solutions from Concentra.

SellingPoint Industrial was developed to enable Industrial Products sales forces to quickly zero in on a prospects' needs, custom configure the ideal solution, and automatically generate an individually tailored proposal at the point of sale. SellingPoint makes critical decision support information available in real-time, on a laptop or via the World Wide Web, whether it be product images, pricing, technical information, availability, financing or other important information that would otherwise delay the sales process.

SellingPoint Industrial is based on SellingPoint, Concentra's revolutionary technology for consultative selling. In 1995, Concentra redefined the sales force automation marketplace when it introduced SellingPoint and its capability to perform functional modeling in addition to logical modeling. Sales configuration systems that rely on logical modeling are limited to validating whether or not a product is properly configured but have no ability to assess the customer's needs and determine the best solution. Functional modeling allows SellingPoint to do what no other configuration system can: deploy client/server, mobile, and web-based applications from a single model; perform interactive customer needs assessments and automatically generate outputs in real time like drawings, quotes, proposals, bills of material and more.

"Large-scale sales force automation implementations to date have been plagued with enormous problems," observed Peter Lanell, VP of Industrial Products and High Tech Solutions at Concentra. "This is because the software doesn't operate the way the industry sells its products; custom programming to tailor these systems for industry needs has been too costly and doesn't provide an adequate return on investment."

Unlike other configuration solutions that were never designed to handle the needs of industrial product selling, SellingPoint Industrial offers "out of the box" industry-specific functionality, much of which is enabled by functional modeling. Rather than force the customer to select specific products or a series of components in the way that logical configuration systems do, SellingPoint Industrial enables a customer to define the configuration based on their actual needs and how the product will be used. Functional modeling also allows the customer to perform price/performance trade-offs, view drawings and 3-D custom product images before they buy, and immediately receive a valid quote or proposal at the point of sale. In addition to SellingPoint's integrated set of general purpose modules for product configuration, quoting, automated proposal generation, catalog and web site deployment, SellingPoint Industrial includes a comprehensive suite of industry-specific modules to speed application development, reduce maintenance costs and delivers powerful consultative selling functionality to industrial products sales forces.

-- EngineerPoint reduces the needs for pre-sale technical resources and associated lag time by enabling salespeople to perform pre-configuration engineering on their laptop PC.

-- DrawingPoint slashes response time and improves proposal quality buy automatically generating proposal drawings that can include notes, dimensions, labels, and title blocks that are unique to each customer.

-- SolidPoint reduces cycle time and the likelihood of misconfigured orders by generating full solid models at the point of sale that can detect spatial constraints and assembly interferences, giving salespeople the power to perform geometric configuration without the use of a CAD system.

-- RenderPoint reduces cycle time and improves proposal quality by generating three-dimensional illustrations of custom-configured products at point of sale.

-- StartingPoint significantly accelerates application development and deployment by providing "out-of-the-box" fully reusable object libraries for components and functions that typically make up industrial products.

-- SketchPoint reduces cycle time through a point-and-click interface for creating parametric sketches of custom components.

-- CAD Point accelerates the product delivery cycle by using DXF and DWG data exchange to pass geometry directly to leading CAD systems.

Concentra's vertical market strategy mirrors many of the trends established by the fast growing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) area. According to Dick Bourke, an acknowledged expert, author and speaker on product configuration and ERP systems, "The ERP marketplace has rapidly evolved to vertical, industry-specific solutions. With major competitive advantages at stake, buyers want to focus on their industry's key concerns. Likewise, specialized solution software suppliers with a vertical product and support services will clearly be in a leading position."

About Concentra

Concentra Corporation is the leading provider of object-oriented and engineering software solutions. Using Concentra's software, market-leading companies worldwide in aerospace, automotive, industrial equipment and high tech industries are creating customer driven product designs, configurations and sales proposals ahead of their competition. Headquartered in Massachusetts, the Company operates from offices across the U.S., Europe and Asia.

For more information, contact Concentra Corporation, 21 North Avenue, Burlington, MA 01803-3301, Tel: [phone], Fax: [phone], or [e-mail].

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