OAK BROOK, Ill., Oct. 14, 2005 -- Senior management at corporations around the world are increasingly focusing on enhancing the performance of their business through demand-driven metrics, according to Mike Hennel, the President of Silvon Software.

Hennel was the keynote speaker this week at Profit 2005 - Making Information Pay for the Demand-Driven Enterprise, this year's Silvon Software Users Group Conference that drew attendees from across the world.

"Seven or eight years ago, you probably didn't see the President or CEO involved with the evaluation of analytical software packages," Hennel told attendees. "Now you always see the President or CEO in demos."

Hennel said there are four key drivers leading senior management to look to enterprise-wide analytics to manage their demand-driven businesses:

Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance - "The requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley are forcing publicly traded companies to be able to verify and validate their data," Hennel said. "Our customers are already using analytics such as Silvon's Stratum Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) suite to improve their performance in customer profitability, better demand forecasting and visibility, and revenue growth. Now C-level executives are finding that tools like Stratum give them better visibility into the data that sits in their transaction systems, and enables them to figure out pretty easily if there are any anomalies of what is going on in their business."

Investor demands - "Senior management can get beaten up by the investment banks about how they are running the business," Hennel said. "The traditional tools of income statements and balance sheets are no longer good enough. In the old days, much of the discussion on the quarterly earnings calls just focused on financial performance. Now CEOs are getting more and more questions on these calls about what they are going to do to drive operations."

Global consistency - "Our customers are now focused on how to get more global consistency and visibility into what is happening within their organizations, and managing the data the same way across the board," Hennel said. "For instance, they may be doing well in one region or one product line, but not in another. They are looking to analytics to help them find out the causes for these variabilities in performance beforehand, instead of after the fact, so their business can be hitting on all cylinders. This helps them to ensure that they are managing the data the same way across the enterprise."

Dashboards - "Companies using scorecards and portals to get dashboards of their key indicators are changing the whole mindset of how to drive the business operationally," Hennel said. "It gets everyone in the company aligned so they know the key metrics they need to be focused on to help improve performance."

Hennel said EPM software solutions such as Stratum are designed to sense and respond to real-time demand by distributing information across the supply chain network - internally, with suppliers, and with customers.

"Customer-centric supply chain operations aren't just about software," Hennel said. "You have to be able to leverage the business processes and technology together. EPM applications enable companies to do just that. They can capture and unify actual demand, and also create demand intelligence and insights to drive their businesses forward."

About Silvon Software, Inc. - www.silvon.com

Silvon Software is a global, supply chain-focused enterprise performance management solutions provider headquartered in the western Chicago suburb of Westmont, Illinois. Since 1987, Silvon has focused on software-based analytic application solutions for manufacturing, wholesale distribution and retail organizations. Silvon's solutions are predicated on the fact that a better business understanding will empower the move toward an optimized supply chain. Silvon's clients benefit from improving business practices and profitability by leveraging analytic information on products, customers, suppliers, and operational performance. The Silvon Stratum product suite offers robust analytic applications, as well as planning, forecasting, closed-loop processing and exception management functionality. The company's products are currently installed at more than 1,500 businesses worldwide.

Silvon Software, Inc. 
Pat Hennel, 630-655-3313
pat.hennel@silvon.com