ORACLE HRMS EXTENDS GLOBAL REACH.

Oracle Corporation (Nasdaq: ORCL), has announced global enhancements to the Oracle Human Resources Management System (HRMS) modules of the Oracle E-Business Suite. New enhancements, including additional country local extensions and further globalization of self-service and time collection and management capabilities, will enable companies to boost internal efficiencies, manage global workforces, and drive self-service throughout the enterprise.

The global enhancements to Oracle HRMS come at a time when businesses are looking for valuable enterprise-wide information in order to make better decisions about their workforce and global operations. As part of the Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle HRMS leverages an open architecture and single data model, which enables companies to get a truly comprehensive, global view of their people operations. Since human resource business requirements can vary according to the unique culture and local reporting needs of each country, Oracle HRMS extends global human resource capabilities with local extensions or "localizations" that expand core functionality to include country-specific requirements all on a single, consistent data and process architecture. With the current release of Oracle HRMS, Oracle expands its menu of local extensions support to Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland, South Africa, and Korea.

These new localizations join existing support for Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, United Kingdom and the United States -- in addition to other country localizations available in conjunction with partner and customer extension architecture blueprints.

While continuing to offer new local extensions, Oracle HRMS maintains a global HR core, a comprehensive set of HR, payroll, and self-service capabilities that are available on a go anywhere basis. This offers customers the flexibility to implement Oracle HRMS for multiple countries within a single instance. The benefit to customers is global workforce management while accommodating local requirements.

Global capabilities for Self-Service HR allow managers and employees to update and use people information through interfaces personalized for job role and responsibility, language and reporting needs on a worldwide basis. Employees around the world can use a self-service interface, designed for the needs of the casual or untrained user, with simple, intuitive navigation and graphics and online help for each field. Interfaces can be configured to match the look and feel that different countries and communities are used to working with.

Finally, the addition of global functionality for the Oracle Time & Labor module provides global organizations a myriad of key benefits such as a central time repository, web and disconnected time entry, automatic timecard approvals, historical timecard views, and absence tracking and reporting. Oracle Time & Labor eliminates redundant time entry for multiple applications and comes with pre-created templates that enable time entry for any segment of the workforce. Employees can submit timecards and review the approval status using a standard web browser. Timecards can then be approved automatically or routed for approval using Oracle Workflow.

"Oracle continues to prove its leadership in the globalization of HR systems worldwide, said Joel Summers, Oracle senior vice president, HRMS Development. "Our latest enhancements to Oracle HRMS coupled with our unique single schema architecture, allows customers to view valuable workforce and operations data and use it to answer questions and make more informed decisions about their global businesses."

Oracle Human Resources provides the centralized data repository for all people management activities throughout an e-business, whether attracting and retaining key performers, deploying employees to mission-critical projects, compensating employees, training new skills, assessing the performance of salespeople, understanding how employee turnover will affect revenue, or planning expansion into new markets.

The Oracle E-Business Suite is the industry's first integrated suite of Internet business applications that automates critical business processes across both front and back office operations. The Oracle E-Business Suite can streamline every area of a business -- marketing, sales, service, contracts, order management, product design, procurement, supply chain, manufacturing, financials, projects, human resources and professional services automation. In 2001, Oracle E-Business Suite applications were implemented by more than 1,100 companies around the world.

Since its initial introduction, Oracle has delivered several releases of E-Business Suite enhancements, resulting in a mature, function-rich set of applications. Oracle E-Business Suite also offers customers unprecedented choice and flexibility in implementing business applications; its open architecture and single data model allow applications to be deployed as individual modules, business flows, or as an entire integrated suite. The Oracle E-Business Suite is offered as traditional software on CD ROMs or as an online service. [sections]