Retail Supply Chain: Eqos Unveils Enhancements To Global Sourcing And Supplier Management Solution

Extended Functionality Improves Retailers' Ability to Scale Private Label Programs

Eqos, Inc. (www.eqos.com), a leading provider of on-demand global sourcing and supplier management solutions for the retail supply chain, today announced the immediate availability of Eqos Release 3.5, which extends and strengthens its end-to-end sourcing capabilities. This new release makes it easier for retailers to work collaboratively with suppliers to simplify, standardize and scale the processes associated with sourcing private label merchandise, from initial product concept, through production and delivery to distribution centers.

Today Eqos manages more than $18B worth of goods sourced from 5,800 suppliers for customers such as Best Buy, Edcon, Sainsbury's and Tesco. These retailers rely on Eqos' hosted solutions to improve supplier collaboration, increase accountability, and identify new global sourcing opportunities. During the past several years, Eqos has leveraged its services oriented architecture (SOA), industry best practices, and strategic customer relationships to configure world-class trading processes spanning global networks that include retailers, suppliers, buying offices and service providers.

Edcon, the leading clothing, footwear and textiles retailing group in South Africa, is one company that is deploying Eqos' solution to help scale its sourcing operation, accelerate response to market trends, minimize stock-outs and markdowns and improve supplier collaboration. Calvin Low, business integration executive, Edcon Group IT, commented, "With our deployment, Eqos will help us better meet market demand and achieve competitive advantage by better managing our supplier network. And with Eqos' services-oriented architecture, we are minimizing the integration time and cost, which translates into a faster return on our investment."

Eqos Release 3.5 Enhancements Include:

• A completely re-engineered user interface, to radically improve user on-boarding and reduce training requirements;
• Executive dashboard that enables comprehensive performance analysis;
• End-user task-management console to drive time-critical processes;
• Comprehensive factory auditing and quality compliance capabilities;
• Eqos Express Implementation Service for 60-day time-to-value.

Chris Foulkes, Eqos Chief Product Officer, said, "We've worked in partnership with customers to develop Eqos Release 3.5; this release broadens our functional footprint across the entire sourcing process, promoting full collaboration among trusted trading partners. Additionally, key enhancements relative to intuitiveness, end-user configurability, and one-touch process modeling are enabling customers to better respond to immediate and evolving merchandising demands of the marketplace."

According to Paula Rosenblum, Vice President of Research and Content Development for Retail Systems Alert Group, "Retailers today improve margins by rapidly responding to consumer demand. One of the greatest barriers to rapid response is the loss of supply chain control and visibility associated with outsourcing the manufacturing of merchandise to far-off parts of the world. Applications like Eqos, which effectively improve supplier collaboration, supply network visibility, and responsiveness, will contribute to expanding margins and improved sales."

About Eqos, Inc.
Eqos is a leading provider of on-demand global sourcing and supplier management solutions for the retail supply chain. Founded in 1997, the company has offices in the U.S. and in the U.K. Eqos' solutions streamline processes associated with private label merchandise strategies from product concept through production, and ultimate delivery to the retailer. Eqos' solutions leverage its SOA (services oriented architecture) along with retailer legacy enterprise and supply chain applications to build forward thinking cross-enterprise processes that promote collaboration between retailers, their suppliers, buying offices and other trading partners. Today, Eqos' on-demand solutions are used by major retailers such as Best Buy, Debenhams, Sainsbury's, Tesco, and Virgin Megastores. More information can be found at www.eqos.com.