IDS Scheer North America Revs Up SAP Implementation Efforts in SME Market With Announcement of Major Deal in Automotive Industry With Onlane Inc.

BERWYN, Pa.--Feb. 3, 2004--

IDS Scheer to Help Leading Automotive Remarketer Deploy mySAP Financials to Streamline Real-Time Transactions

IDS Scheer North America, the leading provider of business process excellence services and tools, today announced a major customer win in the automotive industry with Onlane Inc.'s successful implementation of the mySAP(TM) Business Suite software including mySAP Financials. IDS Scheer has provided and will continue to offer innovative business process consulting services to optimize and enhance the scalability, speed, and performance in all of its automotive remarketing programs. With operations in the U.S. and Canada, Onlane is a customer-friendly automotive remarketing and inventory procurement business run by industry experts with extensive experience in the wholesale buying and selling of pre-owned automobiles.

IDS Scheer helped Onlane leverage the capabilities of mySAP Financials that will provide the foundation for future expansion and growth. The three-month project, which just went live on January 2, integrates Onlane's proprietary web-based remarketing platform with mySAP Financials to further automate the remarketing process and enable the company to conduct real-time transactions with its customers while eliminating the need for manual data entry.

"This significant customer win in the automotive segment with Onlane is a testament to the fact that SAP is not only for the large enterprise. SMEs may not have the budgets of the Global 500 yet still have similar business needs and complexities of larger companies," said Dr. Mathias Kirchmer, CEO of IDS Scheer North America.

"Our highly-skilled SAP process implementation team demonstrated how mySAP Financials can be deployed in the SMB space cost effectively," commented Jason Mausberg, President, IDS Scheer Canada, a subsidiary of IDS North America that is driving the Onlane project implementation. "With SAP myFinancials as the anchor, Onlane and its customers will realize maximum benefits in this implementation consulting effort."

According to Jonathan Varkul, Director of Operations for Onlane, the company evaluated several mid-market solutions. Varkul also reviewed his current package in terms of upgrade options and concluded that the product was not scalable enough to support the company's growth. "We required a solution that would easily scale and integrate with our highly scaleable web-based remarketing platform. We supplied each vendor with a script that detailed our business requirements and found that IDS Scheer's presentation using mySAP Financials provided the best blueprint for our needs," said Varkul. "The technology depth and breadth of this SAP financial solution was important to us as well."

"We were impressed with how quickly the mySAP Financials solution has been implemented and integrated within our technology infrastructure -- due in large part to IDS Scheer's solution blueprinting efforts that were done in advance with the Onlane team," said Clive Kinross, Senior Vice President of Onlane. "Our business philosophy is built on planning and being a forward-thinking technology driven company. The SAP implementation was concluded in a compacted timeframe with minimum disruption to our business, and with no surprises."

Kinross is looking forward to a prosperous 2004 with IDS Scheer as its implementation partner. "As we begin a new year, we expect to continue our significant growth in transaction volumes. The SAP implementation represents our continued commitment to provide rich business intelligence within customized remarketing solutions for our customers. The inherent value of having an implementation partner such as IDS Scheer was evident by the way their consultants worked in tandem with Onlane's team to ensure the project objectives were achieved on time." According to Kinross, the enhanced automation has already provided Onlane with significant additional capacity in its current Operations and Accounting infrastructure. In addition, mySAP Financial provides easier access to the financial performance metrics central to Onlane's business operations at much greater transaction volumes.

About mySAP(TM) Business Suite and mySAP Financials

Through mySAP(TM) Business Suite, people in businesses around the globe are improving relationships with customers and partners, streamlining operations, and achieving significant efficiencies throughout their supply chains. The unique core processes of various industries, from Aerospace to Utilities, are supported effectively by 23 SAP Industry Solutions and are pre-configured in SAP Best Practices.

As the leading solution for providing operational, analytical, and collaborative applications for financial management, mySAP Financials can help you maintain financial control and accountability -- and empower your organization to achieve sustainable growth and profitability.

mySAP Financials enables an organization to:

-- Improve financial planning and forecasting

-- Optimize the planning and performance management cycle

-- Reduce the cost of finance

-- Streamline the financial supply chain

About Onlane Inc.

Onlane Inc. is a leading full-service, automotive remarketing company serving clients in both the United States and Canada. Onlane specializes in providing customized, technology-driven solutions to automotive remarketers in Fleet Management and OEM companies and to licensed automobile dealers. Clients rely on Onlane's comprehensive remarketing application suite to extract meaningful metrics from voluminous data and produce real, actionable information, by remarketing channel, to achieve better results. While components of these programs differ widely based on the needs of our clients, Onlane's focus on measurement is a core discipline within the company. As Onlane's business grows, the company will continue to invest in the infrastructure that affords unparalleled business intelligence for Onlane clients in 2004 and beyond.

About IDS Scheer North America

IDS Scheer North America is the leading provider of corporate solutions for business process management. The company's ARIS solutions suite offers a complete portfolio for "Business Process Excellence," including the methodologies, software and solutions to address all phases of the business process lifecycle. From small/medium enterprises to Global 1000 organizations, IDS Scheer provides a wide array of services to help customers optimize, and profit from, their investments in Supply Chain Management (SCM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) solutions. As a SAP Global Services Partner, IDS Scheer enables customers to maximize their SAP investment and build winning businesses. As part of an organization of more than 2000 employees worldwide and over 200 in North America, IDS Scheer is built upon a foundation of business process excellence that began when the company was founded in 1984 by August-Wilhelm Scheer, widely recognized as a founding father of Business Process Management. For more information on IDS Scheer North America, visit http://www.ids-scheer.com/us.

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