Silvon Unveils Category Management Application
For Food & CPG Manufacturers & Distributors

Westmont, Illinois - March 7, 2000 - Silvon Software, Inc. today announced the availability of CategoryManager, a business intelligence application designed to help Food and Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies strategically analyze and manage product categories, brands and mixes. CategoryManager is built with Silvon's industry-leading data warehousing application foundation, and allows companies to view key business indicators such as sales growth and profitability including product and customer profitability, budget achievement, forecast accuracy, effectiveness of trade and market spending, and market performance for both internal and competitive products. All of this is presented in a format that addresses the most critical data analysis requirements of food and CPG enterprises.

• The CategoryManager application easily integrates with any business transaction (ERP) system for food and CPG operations, pulls and stores the data from ERP systems and from purchased market research data into an efficient format, and offers users the ability to slice and dice the data in an unlimited number of ways. CategoryManager allows executives and decision makers to:
• Validate categories and product mixes by market, account and region
• Understand top and bottom selling products within a category and who's buying them
• Identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities
• Price duplicate product lines appropriately
• Illustrate the strength of brands to existing and prospective customers
• Effectively manage trade funds and tie promotions to sales uplift
• Determine optimal inventory levels

"CategoryManager allows food and CPG enterprises to proactively address their product marketing strategies and opportunities in order to remain viable in the wake of diminishing operating margins," said John H. Hughes, Silvon's Senior Vice President of Sales & Marketing. "Many of our food industry and other CPG customers have expressed an ever-growing need for an application like CategoryManager and we are pleased to meet this need by leveraging 12 years of experience serving supply chain businesses worldwide."

"Category management is absolutely necessary for manufacturers and distributors to optimize their product assortments to be in line with consumer trends," said Charles Germano, Segment Executive, IBM Corporation. "As a diagnostic tool, Silvon's CategoryManager solution helps companies improve profitability and deliver better customer service levels across the supply chain." Silvon CategoryManager runs on the IBM AS/400 and Microsoft NT platforms. The product license fee starts at $75,000 and includes the Silvon DataTracker data warehousing and analytical application platform.

About Silvon
Since 1987, Westmont, Illinois-based Silvon Software has focused on business intelligence software solutions for manufacturing, wholesale distribution and retail organizations. Silvon solutions are predicated on the fact that better business understanding will empower the move toward an optimized Supply Chain organization. Silvon clients benefit from improving business practices and profitability by leveraging analytic information on customer, supplier, and operational profitability measurement. The company's products are driven by the Silvon DataTracker application foundation, which stores and maintains large volumes of data in an efficient, highly scalable format for enterprise-wide access, navigation and OLAP analysis by business users and decision makers. Silvon DataTracker is currently installed in more than 1,200 sites worldwide and supported by a network of OEMs, value-added resellers and independent distributors. For more information about Silvon and CategoryManager, visit www.silvon.com.