TOLEDO, Ohio and LAS VEGAS, June 12, 2001 (PRIMEZONE) -- Owens Corning, a world leader in advanced glass and building material systems, and PurchasePro (Nasdaq:PPRO), a leading B2B e-commerce solutions provider, today announced that Owens Corning experienced significant cost-saving results with the implementation of PurchasePro's e-Source reverse auction solution. With average savings of 17 percent and documented savings of up to 60 percent, Owens Corning expects to save more than $7 million in purchasing expenditures in 2001.
"We are convinced that reverse auction technology is the best way to procure goods," said Michael Mendoza, global e-procurement leader for Owens Corning. "We bring together the expertise and knowledge of our buyers and use their skills to save the company money, time and resources."
With a centralized commodity group in Toledo and a decentralized, 300-member purchasing group spread across 30 countries, Owens Corning's sourcing group handles more than $3.4 billion worth of purchases and 675,000 invoices a year.
PurchasePro e-Source enables companies to deploy its reverse auction technology across an entire enterprise without incurring costs for additional users. e-Source provides companies with an easy-to-use, robust application that enables professional buyers to reduce costs and make more efficient purchases.
Return on Investment
"So far this year, we have hosted 25 online events, averaging a savings of 10 percent on each auction," said Mendoza. "If we save 10 percent on our $3.4 billion product expenditures we'll be very happy."
PurchasePro e-Source enables buyers and suppliers to participate in reverse auctions building on a self-service technology that empowers buyers to craft auction times, logistics and request for proposals within a real-time auction format, while enabling suppliers to sell more products. Providing companies with an unlimited number of auctions without costly transaction fees, PurchasePro e-Source provides a significant return on investment. e-Source offers an easy to use technology with little integration challenges.
"Providing Fortune 500 companies with highly scalable, strategic-sourcing solutions that offer significant returns on investment and savings is key to creating market share in this economy," said Chris Benyo, senior vice president of marketing for PurchasePro. "We are convinced that e-Source will enable any Fortune 1000 company to save as Owens Corning has."
Owens Corning Documented Cost Savings
Throughout its implementation period, Owens Corning has documented significant cost savings on the following products versus its traditional procurement process:
-- 60% versus historic cost of bottled water -- 25% verses historical price of stretchwrap -- 10% versus direct and indirect goods and services -- 7% versus lowest paper bid for construction services
Built on the concept of a "reverse auction," e-Source enables qualified suppliers to bid for a buyer's business in real-time over the Internet. PurchasePro e-Source enables buyers to create and send electronic requests for information (RFI) and requests for quotes (RFQ), enhance supplier collaboration, determine auction times, resolve logistics, source from their existing suppliers as well as the PurchasePro global marketplace of more than 155,000 businesses, and conduct real-time auctions from their desktops. Other features of the product include support for closed bidding, sealed bids and absentee bidding.
"Companies that aren't doing this, just don't understand," said Mendoza. "This is where procurement is headed."
About Owens Corning
Owens Corning is a world leader in building materials systems and composites systems. The company has sales of about $5 billion and employs approximately 20,000 people worldwide. For more information, please visit Owens Corning's Website at: http://www.owenscorning.com
About PurchasePro
PurchasePro(r), www.purchasepro.com, a leader in business-to-business e-commerce, operates the PurchasePro global marketplace, encompassing more than 155,000 businesses and powering hundreds of private-label marketplaces. PurchasePro provides the following business-to-business e-commerce solutions: e-Procurement for corporate procurement; v-Distributor for online distributors; and e-MarketMaker for Internet market makers and e-Source for strategic sourcing.
This news release may include forward-looking statements, which are subject to the "Safe Harbor" created by Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. These forward-looking statements involve certain risks and uncertainties that can cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements represent only the views of certain members of management and are based on limited information available to us now, which is subject to change. We have no current plan to update these statements. Actual results may differ substantially from what we say today and no one should assume at a later date that the forward-looking statements provided herein are still valid. They speak only as of today.
For more information about these risks and uncertainties, see the SEC filings of PurchasePro Inc., including the section titled "Factors That May Affect Results" in its 10-K filing for the period ended December 31, 2000, and its 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2001, which are available from the company on request and on the Internet at the SEC's Website, www.sec.gov.
Note: PurchasePro is a servicemark of PurchasePro.com Inc. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.