Alcoa Extends Procurement Leadership with SAQQARA's Managed Service

SAN JOSE, Calif., May 3, 2004 - SAQQARA® Inc., an innovative provider of commerce data management solutions, announced that Alcoa, the world's leading producer of primary and fabricated aluminum, is automating key parts of its e-Procurement process using SAQQARA's Commerce Data Management (CDM) for e-Procurement. Widely recognized as a leader in procurement and IT management, Alcoa has implemented SAQQARA CDM for e-Procurement to cut costs, achieve spend management objectives and advance toward its goal of becoming the world's best supply management organization.

Alcoa, a recognized early-adopter and leader in leveraging technology to drive savings, faced the complex challenge of integrating hundreds of suppliers into its e-procurement system. The company's intense focus on value delivery, customer service, and cost-savings led it to consider outsourcing the process of supplier enablement and catalog management. It turned to SAQQARA. SAQQARA's managed services enable Alcoa to intelligently unify and manage its requirements for supplier engagement, content acquisition, content transformation, and publication.

"Alcoa embraces and applies technology far ahead of the pack, with high efficacy, and they continually deliver value to their business," said Bradley Albright, president and chief executive officer of SAQQARA. "Alcoa is not only a customer, but a valued strategic partner whose solution needs have helped drive our managed service offerings over the years."

Prior to choosing SAQQARA, Alcoa relied on an in-house solution that was staffed by consultants. The system was difficult to maintain, difficult to scale, and the information was frequently outdated. After a thorough evaluation, Alcoa selected SAQQARA for its fully automated capabilities to fuse together and manage disparate data and business policies, creating a unified intelligent data master required for optimizing ESM. The fact that SAQQARA offered a managed service meant that Alcoa no longer had to perform these services in-house, resulting in decreased costs and greater scalability.

"When we measure success, we look at how much we're delivering in bottom-line savings," said Tammy Hardy, Alcoa's manager of Global Supply Solutions. "Each month, we drive over 13,000 high-volume, low-value purchase order transactions through our optimized e-procurement process, at a considerable cost savings. Our goal now is to continue to ramp up transaction volume, while improving the customer and supplier experience. We'll depend on SAQQARA to help support this charge—they have been a key enabler in our ability to deliver value to the business."

"SAQQARA has really stepped up to help us supercharge our supplier enablement and catalog management needs," said Jack Colletti, manager Alcoa Mall and e-Enablement. "Within three months, we had over 100 catalog suppliers in the system — satisfying our objective of quickly adding suppliers and managing the updates of the existing supplier catalogs. SAQQARA's managed service now supports over 250 supplier catalogs and over 1 million SKUs. SAQQARA's CDM for e-Procurement drastically lowered the cost of acquiring, transforming and managing that content."

About Alcoa
Alcoa is the world's leading producer of primary aluminum, fabricated aluminum and alumina, and is active in all major aspects of the industry. Alcoa serves the aerospace, automotive, packaging, building and construction, commercial transportation and industrial markets, bringing design, engineering, production and other capabilities of Alcoa's businesses to customers. In addition to aluminum products and components, Alcoa also markets consumer brands including Reynolds Wrap® foils and plastic wraps, Alcoa® wheels, and Baco® household wraps. Among its other businesses are vinyl siding, closures, fastening systems, precision castings, and electrical distribution systems for cars and trucks. The company has 120,000 employees in 41 countries and has been a member of the Dow Jones Industrial Average for 45 years and the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes since 2001. More information can be found at www.alcoa.com

About SAQQARA Inc.
SAQQARA provides managed services that transform potential savings into actual savings by eliminating the barriers to optimized enterprise spend management. Only SAQQARA offers fully automated end-to-end fusion between data and business policies to create and maintain transactionable, intelligent, dynamic commerce data. More than 80 customers worldwide rely on SAQQARA including global enterprises such as Alcoa, America West, Cooper Industries, and Honeywell. SAQQARA is a privately held corporation with headquarters in San Jose, California. For further information about the company and its products, visit http://www.saqqara.com or call 408-325-8200 or toll free 877-964-0100.

©2001-2004 SAQQARA Inc. SAQQARA CDM for e-Procurement, SAQQARA CommerceSuite, SAQQARA ContentWorks, and SAQQARA Cornerstone are trademarks. The SAQQARA name and SAQQARA logo are registered trademarks of SAQQARA Inc. All other company names mentioned herein are registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective owners.