Datasweep Announces Advantage 4.0 With Supply Chain Collaboration Portal for Managing Global Operations.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 5, 2001

Customers Gain Real-Time Global Visibility and

Analysis Capabilities Across the Extended Enterprise

Datasweep, Inc., the leading provider of real-time collaborative manufacturing solutions, today announced the newest version of its flagship product, Advantage 4.0.

Datasweep Advantage 4.0 features a Supply Chain Collaboration Portal that gives manufacturers the first seamless and personalized real-time view of manufacturing operations across plants, divisions, and throughout their private supply chain. The portal not only enables complex analysis on data from manufacturing and repair operations, but it also extends this analytical capability to correlate data between Datasweep and other enterprise applications to improve time to market, reduce inventory, and cut supply chain costs. Advantage 4.0 also includes new applications to automate return material and repair processes that enable "cradle to grave" traceability for individual products and closed loop quality tracking and analysis to improve product line lifecycle management.

"Datasweep Advantage 4.0 provides Flextronics with the ability to quickly deploy multi-line manufacturing and repair facilities around the world and then make this information visible via the Web to customers and internal people to use to drive improvement," said Jim Puzar, Senior Global Program Manager, IT for Flextronics, International.

"Advantage 4.0 gives a global view of manufacturing and repair operations and world-class reporting and analysis capabilities, so that multinational manufacturers can see, correlate, and analyze critical information captured in factories around the world," said Kevin Chao, co-founder and vice president of engineering at Datasweep.

WHAT'S NEW IN ADVANTAGE 4.0

Web Reporting Portal

Supply Chain Event Management: The Supply Chain Collaboration Portal gives manufacturers the first seamless view of real-time manufacturing information across plants, divisions, and throughout their private supply chain. The portal gives customers a multi-level, personalized view of their enterprise operations, and triggers notifications if critical performance indicators deviate from user defined thresholds. Personalized views deliver production metrics tailored to the end user's specific role within the company, which allows them to see relevant information by end customers, product lines, and geographies to meet customer expectations, improve quality and reduce costs. Users can easily drill down on report parameters to isolate the root cause of deteriorating trends in real-time.

Complex Analysis on Enterprise Information to Drive Improvement: Manufacturers with disparate international operations can gather data from every manufacturing and repair site and then analyze this information by product line, region, division, or any other type of grouping for comparison. The portal allows customers to view plant floor and repair center data integrated with data from other enterprise applications, including Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Product Data Management (PDM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. Customers can now correlate and analyze critical production data to improve time to market and dramatically improve supply chain effectiveness and efficiency. Reports can be published to a corporate repository, or run on a periodic basis to continually monitor cycle time and quality performance.

Global Deployment

Advantage 4.0 provides the increased performance, enhanced infrastructure, and scalability to support global deployments. Production benchmarks from current global Datasweep customers prove that Advantage 4.0 provides outstanding performance and scalability for demanding, high-volume manufacturing requirements. Centralized, Web-based administration for all Datasweep applications facilitates flexibility, new production line rollouts, and maintenance throughout a company's global operations. Due to the Web-based architecture, new deployments can be distributed and maintained via a Web browser, providing unparalleled efficiency and cost savings for the large, multinational manufacturer.

RMA Management and Repair Operations

Advantage 4.0 includes two new applications: Return Material Authorization (RMA) Management and Repair Operations that help OEMs and EMS companies to improve reverse supply chain management and product lifecycle management. Datasweep customers could always track the full detailed production history of individual units or different phases of a product line in manufacturing. These new applications allow customers and their outsourcing partners to manage the customer return and repair process more effectively and capture all of the detailed field defect, repair and upgrade information that now occurs on separate, often paper-based, service systems. Since Datasweep is entirely Web based, customers can capture and retain visibility into this RMA and repair information whether the service work is done in-house, by their contract manufacturing partners, or by third party repair companies. These new applications give Datasweep customers the ability to meet their business and regulatory requirements for "cradle to grave" tracking of a product throughout its lifecycle.

"Field service can be the most costly part of a typical customer relationship. Datasweep solutions, especially with the addition of the RMA and Repair applications, will help manage the field service and upgrade programs effectively. We expect to see a reduction in field failures with the continuous collaboration between engineering, manufacturing, and services," said Susan Barnes, VP of Finance, Service and Regulatory Affairs, Intuitive Surgical, Inc.

Datasweep customers can track manufacturing and service activity throughout the lifecycle of a product or product line and gain the ability to do focused recalls on major product issues that improves customer satisfaction and dramatically reduces costs. Integrating manufacturing and repair applications helps customers to significantly increase service profitability by reducing repair cycle times by 30%, cutting administrative costs, and reducing service and repair inventory that increasingly are resulting in multi-million-dollar inventory write-offs for multinational OEMs.

Pricing and Availability

Advantage 4.0 is available now. The Supply Chain Collaboration Portal starts at $250,000 and the RMA and Repair Applications are $20,000 per application, and $4,500 per concurrent user.

About Datasweep

Datasweep develops and markets real-time collaborative manufacturing solutions for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), electronic manufacturing service providers, and critical component suppliers. Datasweep's solutions leverage the Internet to give OEMs and their key manufacturing partners the Web visibility into and control of real-time manufacturing information to drive improvements in planning, manufacturing, and product lifecycle management. Customers include Flash Electronics, Flextronics International, Ltd. (FLEX), Lucent (LU), Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), KLA-Tencor Corporation (KLAC), and emerging optical networking leaders Avanex (AVNX), Kestrel Solutions, and Novalux. Datasweep was named one of the "Hot 100" Private Companies for 2000 in the business-to-business category by Upside Magazine (www.upside.com). Additional information can be found on the Internet at www.datasweep.com.