Cumberland County, PA Turns to Answerthink and Lawson to Streamline Finance, HR, Procurement.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

MIAMI--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 1, 2003

Proven Hackett Group Best Practices Will Drive Lawson Implementation

Answerthink, Inc. (Nasdaq:ANSR) announced today that it has been selected by Pennsylvania's Cumberland County government to provide consulting services in support of the county's migration to the Lawson software suite, and implement best practices in finance, HR, procurement, and other areas.

Answerthink is a leading business and technology consulting firm that enables companies to achieve world-class business performance.

Utilizing its Best Practices Implementation (BPI) approach and tools, Answerthink will work with the county to configure Lawson Series 8.0.3, streamline work processes, and implement proven best practices from The Hackett Group. The Hackett Group is the world leader in global process benchmarking and best practice research, offering strategic advice backed by research at nearly 2,000 client organizations, including 97 percent of the Dow Jones Industrials and 81 percent of the Fortune 100.

"We knew from the start that we wanted to make some major improvements in county operations," explained Terry Kline, Cumberland County ERP Project Manager. "After interviewing more than 14 vendors, we selected Answerthink and Lawson as our partners for this major project. While other vendors came to us with a cookie cutter approach, Answerthink presented us with a customized plan that took into account our needs and showed an understanding of the complexity of our situation. They also have an exceptional track record helping government organizations like ours. Finally, the ability to build in proven Hackett best practices as part of their implementation was a major selling point."

Complex Issues & Outdated Financial Systems

In 2002, Cumberland County set out on a quest to improve their business processes and productivity. After nearly two decades of use, the county's accounting package was outdated and ill-equipped to handle the complexities that come with managing the county's $111 million annual budget. To do their planning and budgeting, county government officials have had to offload data from the legacy "green screen" system and create hundreds of individual spreadsheets. This approach was time-intensive, and it meant that the numbers they were working with quickly became out of date.

New Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB) regulations for 2003 also required the county to improve the way it reported financial information to the federal government. Finally, Cumberland County needed a way to interface with a new financial system implemented by the state of Pennsylvania. To accomplish all this, Cumberland County needed a state-of-the-art system that enabled it to analyze real-time data and make more intelligent financial decisions.

With more than 1,250 employees working everywhere from county offices to local prisons and nursing homes, Cumberland County also needed a way to streamline its HR capabilities. Another priority of county officials was to improve the ability of more than 215,000 county residents to access critical services and information via the Internet.

Strong Lawson Experience, Unique Approach

"Cumberland County takes its responsibility to its citizens quite seriously, and that's a wonderful thing. We're proud that they've chosen Answerthink and Lawson to help them make this major change in their operations," said Answerthink President Allan Frank. "Hackett best practices have proven their ability to improve efficiency, cut costs, and streamline operations at some of the world's most successful companies. Soon, Cumberland County will be able to begin reaping all these benefits and more."

With the combination of considerable state and local government experience and its focus on best practice-based solutions for the public sector market, Answerthink has emerged as a leading strategic partner for Lawson's mid-tier governmental clients. As a certified Lawson Business Partner, Answerthink has served more than 27 Lawson clients over the past three years. Answerthink's Lawson experts, averaging nearly 10 years of experience, are all Lawson 8.0 certified. Answerthink's Lawson consultants are true business consultants, delivering a powerful combination of application-specific knowledge and comprehensive business and technology expertise to deliver maximum value to clients. Answerthink also maintains its own research lab running the latest two releases of Lawson software, enabling consultants to develop and test solutions in a real world environment and test integration with other packages.

Answerthink offers comprehensive Lawson services in more than a dozen areas, including: benchmarking, software evaluation and selection, transformation and re-engineering, migration and upgrades, and customization and interface design.

As part of its new Best Practices Implementation (BPI) initiative, Answerthink has created an extensive repository of tools that enable its consultants to integrate specific Hackett best practices as they implement individual business applications, including the Lawson suite. These application-specific tools include implementation and configuration guides, current state questionnaires, process flows, and fit/gap requirements matrices. The BPI tools have been customized to address individual vendors' application suites.

About Answerthink

Answerthink, Inc. (http://www.answerthink.com) is a leading business and technology consulting firm that enables companies to achieve world-class business performance. By leveraging the comprehensive database of The Hackett Group, the world's leading repository of enterprise best practice metrics and business process knowledge, Answerthink's business and technology solutions help clients significantly improve performance and maximize returns on technology investments. Answerthink's capabilities include benchmarking, business transformation, business applications, technology integration, and offshore application maintenance and support. Founded in 1997, Answerthink has offices in 9 cities throughout the United States and in Europe.

About The Hackett Group

The Hackett Group, an Answerthink company, (http://www.thehackettgroup.com) provides fact-based, objective insights that help clients optimize processes, organization, technology and information in key corporate functions such as finance, IT, human resources, and procurement. Hackett's research-derived guidance is backed by its continuously updated database of benchmark metrics and best practices in use at nearly 2,000 client organizations, including 97 percent of the Dow Jones Industrials, 81 percent of the Fortune 100, and 88 percent of the Dow Jones Global Titans Index. In addition to benchmark studies of finance, IT, SG&A (sales, general, and administrative), human resources, and related areas, Hackett offers management research services and subscription-based collaborative learning programs in shared services and other administrative support processes.

Certain statements in this press release are "forward looking statements'' within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the Company's actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from the results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward looking statements. Factors that impact such forward looking statements include the ability of the Company to attract additional business, changes in expectations regarding the information technology industry, the ability of the Company to attract skilled employees, possible changes in collections of accounts receivable, risks of competition, price and margin trends, changes in general economic conditions and interest rates as well as other risks detailed in the Company's reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.