MFG.com Unveils Manufacturing's First Online Collaborative Sourcing Service

ATLANTA - Dec. 13, 2005- MFG.com, the world's largest marketplace for sourcing and selling custom-manufactured goods and services, today announced the general availability of a new collaborative sourcing service created exclusively for OEMs who source custom-manufactured components through MFG.com. This new service enhances MFG.com's focus on community by furthering collaboration in the enterprise and also helps to increase the quality of sourcing, improves buying decisions and saves time and resources.

"We are helping to unlock the intelligence of the enterprise," said Mitch Free, president and CEO of MFG.com. "This service will allow engineers and buyers to collaborate with suppliers during the design phase in the product lifecycle and dramatically reduce the product cost and time to market while increasing product quality and customer satisfaction. This gives our community of buyers, engineers, and purchasing professionals the ability to discover and collaborate with the perfect supplier for a project, and manage valuable relationships for continuously improving performance."

Collaborative sourcing is the participation of multiple purchasing professionals and/or engineers collaborating internally or with external suppliers in a single sourcing system. The new offering provides a suite of online tools that streamline the sourcing process, automate collaboration and efficiently manage the supply chain. Buyers linked together online can securely distribute Requests for Quotes (RFQs), collaborate internally with other buyers, collaborate externally with suppliers, manage supplier data, and perform advanced sourcing analytics at an individual, group or product level. The new service is hosted and managed by MFG.com, with no software or hardware for the customer to buy or maintain. The service is free to purchasing professionals and engineers sourcing engineered to order parts on MFG.com.

The collaboration enabled through MFG.com's standardized sourcing platform gives companies a sharable, macro-level view of their supplier network. The result of this improved communication is higher sourcing quality, more informed buying decisions and sustainable bottom-line savings.

Key features of MFG.com include:

• Collaboratively Source with Others Inside and Beyond Your Company.
  Buyers, engineers and others who play a role in sourcing can collaborate seamlessly on sourcing events. For example, a buyer may be responsible for the business aspects in a sourcing process, and an engineer may be responsible for the technical aspects, such as providing CAD files or answering technical questions. Both can interact efficiently to produce an RFQ, respond to suppliers, and evaluate quotes.
• Complete Audit Trail and Leveraged Corporate Intelligence.
  System-generated and user-added notes to supplier profiles, RFQs, quotes and quote actions (award, decline, negotiated, etc.) provide a complete audit trail for sourcing events and create sharable corporate intelligence.
• Shared Information, Reporting and Data Export.
  Companies can selectively enable linked users to share data such as preferred/approved suppliers lists, blacklists, supplier ratings and prior history with a supplier. Users can create project folders and see rolled-up, projected, per-unit costs for all components in a folder as quotes come in. This makes it easy to compare quotes to baseline or target prices. MFG.com provides a comprehensive suite of reporting tools enabling companies to run on-the-fly "what if" scenarios and to export data to Excel or other internal systems.
• Include Favored Suppliers.
  MFG.com users can invite their existing suppliers to participate in RFQs, even if those suppliers are not already members of the MFG.com network. Invited suppliers may quote work, but only for the invited RFQs. MFG.com respects privately invited suppliers and their privacy.
• Digitally Signed Non-Disclosure Agreements.
  When users create an RFQ they can elect to require suppliers to digitally sign non-disclosure agreements before accessing drawings and documents. And as a secondary level of security, users can elect to review the signature and company profile prior to granting access. Thus, no one gets access to data without explicit approval.

More than 43,000 buyers across the industrial spectrum (aerospace, transportation, consumer products, electronics and more) use MFG.com to source, collaborate, and receive quotes online for more than 200 manufacturing processes such as CNC machining, metal stamping, forging, plastic molding, metal fabrication and metal casting.