A Method to the Madness

San Jose, CA, Fairfax, VA, and Miami  April 24, 2001  OneChem Ltd., an application service provider to the chemical industry; and webMethods Inc. a provider of integration software solutions, today announced the successful implementation of the OneChem Customer Care integrated solution at Vulcan Chemicals. The combination of the OneChem e-Commerce Platform and webMethods' integration solutions provides Vulcan's customers with online access to critical supply chain documents and logistics activities. These include bills of lading, invoices, certificates of analysis, return rail bills of lading, and provides the ability to view rail car status information and report rail car expected arrival date. Vulcan's buyers see benefit by being able to access this information as soon as it is available, 24 hours a day.

"OneChem's technology provides another option for conducting business with Vulcan Chemicals. Via Vulcan's Internet Self-service StoreFront, it will give our customers the ability to view documents pertaining to their contracts with us without the need for our customer service representative's personal assistance," said Brian Stauss, business manager for e-Commerce at Vulcan Chemicals. "It will also increase our customer's satisfaction in two ways, by providing instant information on demand and by allowing our customer service reps to concentrate on issues that bring more value to our customers. We have a group of pilot customers currently testing the StoreFront and plan to offer it to other customers."

As transaction data is generated, it is passed from the Vulcan order management system, through webMethods B2B to the OneChem e-Commerce Platform. The data is then processed and available for presentation to buyers via the Vulcan StoreFront.

"OneChem's technology allows Vulcan to create a very personalized and branded experience for their buyers without the need for costly custom development associated with other available tools," said Jay Starkman, president at OneChem. "Combined with our extensive infrastructure and managed services capability, we deliver deep chemical industry functionality in a high availability and secure environment right out of the box."

"webMethods is pleased to work with OneChem, a company that shares our focus and commitment to customer success," said Glenn MacKenzie, director, Process Industry Solutions for webMethods Inc. "Our complementary relationship provides some of the world's leading chemical companies with a comprehensive, system-to-system integration and front-end applications solution that significantly extends their functionality and operations services."

webMethods has also partnered with Agile Software Corp., a provider of collaborative manufacturing commerce solutions, to enable customers to connect Agile's solutions with the applications that webMethods' Integration Platform supports.

Agile Anywhere is a suite of collaborative manufacturing solutions that enables manufacturers to build private product manufacturing collaboration exchanges, automating the distribution and synchronization of product content across the e-supply chain. webMethods' integration platform will collaborate with the Agile Integration Server, an Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based integration solution that makes the product content (product DNA) held in Agile Anywhere available to other mission-critical business applications. This joint solution will allow the product information stored in Agile to be shared with applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), knowledge management, purchasing and inventory management systems.

"Allowing customers and partners to connect to market-leading software from companies such as Agile will be important for creating true collaborative commerce," said Tom Roberts, vice president of Platform Alliances for webMethods. "webMethods is focused on expanding the range of solutions to which we provide access, furthering our goal of helping customers reduce costs, create new revenue opportunities, strengthen relationships with customers and partners, increase supply chain efficiencies, and streamline internal business processes."

The webMethods integration platform automates business processes both inside the enterprise and securely with partners and customers over the Internet. The platform enables customers to achieve significant return on investment by linking business processes, enterprise and legacy applications, databases and workflows within and across enterprises. Agile and webMethods are integrating Agile Anywhere, Agile Integration Server (AIS) and webMethods' Integration Platform, enhancing accessibility to product content that Agile solutions pull from integrated enterprise application systems.

"Our partnership with webMethods is further proof of Agile's ongoing commitment to providing seamless integration across business solutions, enabling our customers to easily build upon their Agile investments," said Agile Vice President of Product Marketing Rakesh Sharma. "By leveraging our industry-leading collaboration solutions in dynamic product content, and combining it with webMethods' industry-standard integration infrastructure, we can further accelerate intelligent collaboration across the extended value chains, bringing products to market faster while driving down costs for our customers."