Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated Taps Decision Support Cross-Platform Data Access Tools to Optimize Supply Chain Management

Matthews, NC - April 29, 2002 - Decision Support Inc. (www.decisionsupport.com), innovator in disparate data integration, reporting and decision support tools and services to the mainframe and open systems market, announced today that Coca-Cola Bottling Company Consolidated (CCBCC) has implemented Decision Support's DQbroker(R) and DQview(TM). Headquartered in Charlotte, NC, CCBCC is the nation's second-largest Coca- Cola bottling company, with 93 bottling locations throughout the Southeastern United States. The bottler's forecasting reports, compiled from data marts, had not been able to access the most up-to-date sales and manufacturing data, and took hours to compile, often slowing deliveries. CCBCC selected Decision Support Inc.'s cross-platform data access tools to link critical, up-to-date business data across disparate platforms to produce faster and more accurate forecasting reports.

DQbroker is a distributed query enterprise data access engine that effectively accesses, joins, and updates distributed data in real time, independent of database or application vendor, hardware platform or geographic location. DQview is a plug-in for Microsoft(R) Excel that enables enterprise queries to be created and embedded in Excel spreadsheets.

CCBCC had undertaken a supply chain initiative and implemented Manugistics, a leading supply chain solution that outputs data to UNIX flat files. The challenge for CCBCC was that critical business data, including millions of sales transactions, was stored on an IBM OS 390 mainframe in massive, complex VSAM files, which were incompatible with the UNIX flat files. CCBCC sought a solution that would provide the bottler with a fast, efficient way to simultaneously access and join its critical sales and manufacturing data records on a daily basis to forecast inventory for deliveries to retail outlets. CCBCC selected Decision Support's DQbroker to deliver a rapidly implemented, efficient solution to automate the extraction, transfer and loading of the UNIX flat files to an Oracle database, which provides much faster retrieval capabilities. The next step incorporated CrossAccess's eXadas(TM)to extract data from the VSAM files, enabling DQbroker to join the extracted VSAM and Oracle data on a per-query basis.

CCBCC IS Project Manager, Lisa Steves, said, "We selected DQbroker because we wanted a solution we could implement rapidly that would enable us to access massive VSAM files and do cross-platform joins from our mainframe to UNIX-based Oracle files. The professional services team from Decision Support Inc. came in, assessed our needs, and ran a proof of concept test. Once we experienced the immediate data access and joining capabilities of DQbroker and DQview, we implemented a fully functional solution, which Decision Support's professional services team completed for us in less than five weeks.

"Now we are able to produce daily inventory and manufacturing forecasts in minutes, helping speed our delivery trucks on their way," continued Steves. "DQbroker has provided us with the ability to readily access and manipulate our data in an easily scalable architecture, which will make it easier for us to accomplish any future projects that require data from multiple sources."

Herb Verbesey, CEO, Decision Support, said, "We are pleased that we could help CCBCC find a rapid and efficient solution to access and work with their business-critical disparate data by utilizing DQbroker's robust cross-platform data access capabilities."

About Decision Support Inc.

Decision Support Inc. provides cross-platform data access tools, and reporting and decision support software and services to a worldwide customer base comprising manufacturers, banks and credit unions, healthcare providers, and government agencies. Its latest generation of browser-based reporting solutions incorporates the DQbroker enterprise data access technology developed by Metagon Technologies that enables users to view, modify, and join disparate data in real time, and provides on-demand queries as well as standard scheduled reports. Decision Support is headquartered in Matthews, NC. For more information, visit www.decisionsupport.com or call 704-845-1000.

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DQpowersuite, DQtransform, DQadmin, and DQbroker are registered trademarks of Metagon Technologies LLC, and DQagent and DQview are trademarks of Metagon Technologies, LLC. DQvista is a registered trademark of Decision Support Inc. All other brand names and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners, and are used with no intention of infringement on the trademark.