Corporate United Synergy 2006 Headlines Industry Leaders; Fifth-Annual Event Features Three Days of Thought-Provoking Ideas on Business Strategy Advances.

CHICAGO -- Corporate United, the world's leading group purchasing organization, today announced the final agenda for Synergy 2006. Attendees will hear from executives from ChevronTexaco, Aetna, and others. The complimentary event, which will be held April 25-27 at The Palmer House hotel in Chicago, will gather leading executives and supply chain thought leaders from around the United States.

In addition to featuring a series of roundtables facilitated by industry-leading experts, the event will play host to some of the most influential people in the supply chain world who are featured on the third day of the conference.

Glen Meakem

Glen Meakem, FreeMarkets founder and CEO, leads the slate of executives on the third day of the conference with tough talk on managing entrepreneurial suppliers. FreeMarkets (acquired by Ariba in 2004) revolutionized sourcing when it launched in 1995; helping organizations achieve dramatic savings and profit improvements by replacing decades-old manual purchasing processes with Internet-deployed software to manage supply.

Helmut Porkert

Next up, Helmut Porkert, former chief procurement officer for ChevronTexaco, gives an insightful and forward-thinking view into world-class processes with world-class people. Porkert led ChevronTexaco's global procurement, strategic sourcing, supplier management and integration activities, as well as supply chain management activities, for all of the company's worldwide operations. Under his leadership, ChevronTexaco worked to leverage its global buying power and put in place procurement and supply chain processes that have supported corporate drives for operational excellence and produced major savings for the company.

Dwight Howes

Dwight Howes follows Porkert with a focused presentation on world-class contract management. Howes is the leading supply chain contract management expert in the United States. As a founding partner of the Pittsburgh office of McGuire Woods LLP, his practice focuses on business transactions, including strategic procurement, supply chain management and acquisitions. He has been a featured speaker for the Institute for Supply Management. Howes counsels companies on implementing and running compliance and ethics programs. He serves as an arbitrator for the American Arbitration Association's Commercial, International.

Pierre Mitchell

Giving further weight to the value of supply management, Pierre Mitchell, director of research at the Hackett Group, drives home the importance of enterprise supply management and functional alignment. Mitchell is recognized as the unrivaled guru of supply chain management and the technologies that enable efficiencies inside this space. Mitchell is the director of research and also a senior business advisor in the Procurement Executive Advisory service at the Hackett Group. Previously, Mitchell served as vice president of supply management research at AMR Research, where he provided business executives with objective business counsel regarding procurement and supply chain best practices and technologies. Mitchell has been recognized as one of the practitioner "Pros to Know" by Supply Demand Chain Executive magazine.

Keith Jones 

Finally, to round off the executive session, Aetna's Chief Procurement Officer Keith Jones will speak on total cost management and share value. Jones has previously held senior procurement leadership roles at Motorola, General Dynamics, and Hewlett-Packard and is a graduate of Georgia Tech. He has presented at a number of executive sourcing conferences, including the Conference Board, Sourcing Interest Group and the Institute for Supply Management -- frequently as the keynote speaker.

For the complete conference breakout on topics and complimentary conference registration go to www.corporateunited.com/synergy2006. Or call 440-895-0938.

About Corporate United

Since 1997, Corporate United has been assisting the world's largest and leading companies to realize the power of leverage and indirect spend savings on their bottom lines. Corporate United facilitates an unrivaled network and provides the services and resource flexibility companies need to manage their enterprise spend requirements.

CU provides more than 80 Global 2000 companies across every industry sector with sourcing and contract management solutions. As the world's leading group purchasing organization, Corporate United helps members succeed by combining leverage, knowledge, and sourcing expertise to achieve more from supply chain efforts. To learn more about Corporate United and how we can help your organization, please visit our Web site at: www.corporateunited.com or call us at 440-895-0938.