MONE Matrixone (MM)

The Latest Release of MatrixOne PLM Gives Business Leaders Better Visibility and Control over Strategic Product Development Investment Decisions, Helps Companies Reduce Product Development Costs and Speed Delivery of New Product Innovations MatrixOne, Inc. (NASDAQ: MONE), a leading provider of collaborative product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions for the value chain(TM), today announced that its latest release includes enhanced product portfolio management and synchronous product engineering capabilities, allowing customers across the globe to make more strategic decisions about the development of new products. By helping companies reduce development costs and speed introductions, the MatrixOne(R) PLM platform is enabling companies to increase the potential return on their new product innovations. "With the new product development process becoming increasingly complex, companies need advanced solutions that deliver to everyone touching the new product process -- from the drawing board to the boardroom -- the most accurate, updated information needed to make informed decisions," said Sam Zawaideh, senior vice president of products and solutions for MatrixOne. "Our product portfolio management and synchronous engineering solutions help organizations eliminate barriers and enable true real-time collaboration and decision making." Due to mass customizations and personalizations, the number of new products rolled out to consumers worldwide continues to blossom at a record-pace -- and companies are forced to spread their limited product development budgets among an increasing variety of new products. In order to accurately capture customer needs, efficiently execute new product development projects and analyze the performance of various product development business processes in real-time, a PLM-based product portfolio management solution is needed. When implemented correctly within a PLM platform, portfolio management capabilities serve as the foundation to analyze competing product opportunities -- providing management with the information needed to make the funding, development and launch decisions that are increasingly important to a company's future. In addition to having the proper tools to successfully manage its product portfolio, a company needs to eliminate the significant barriers that exist between different design disciplines and work to enable effective real-time collaboration among them all --something known as "synchronous engineering." In order for products to be developed on-time and on-budget and with no costly errors, these various disciplines -- often comprised of electrical, semiconductor, mechanical and software design elements -- must work together on an enterprise product data view that is automatically updated with the latest information, no matter where system, design, and manufacturing engineers are based in the world. In addition, the solution must enable companies to adhere to and keep pace with new environmental compliance regulations throughout the product development process. Synchronous engineering helps compress development cycles, improve information reuse and reduce the possibility of product rework, ultimately enabling companies to produce better and more products at a lower cost. MatrixOne Portfolio Management Solutions Customer Needs Management for Product Portfolio Planning Fast changing technology, increased government safety and environmental regulations, reduced time to market demands and challenging customer requirements are placing ever-increasing pressures on manufacturers. Effective customer needs management lies at the heart of an organization's ability to meet customer expectations and keep pace with the rising tide of product complexity. MatrixOne's customer needs management solution allows product companies to bridge the gap between marketing requirements and engineering design. Companies can improve part and design reuse by utilizing common modules across multiple product lines and ultimately deliver the right products to market as quickly and efficiently as possible. Product Portfolio Project Execution A company's product strategy is only as good as its ability to successfully launch new products to the marketplace on time and on budget. MatrixOne's product portfolio project execution solution provides a robust and scalable solution for companies to execute global product development projects across the extended enterprise. Best practices are reinforced through the use of project templates, which allow companies to execute development projects through a repeatable phase/gate process. Before starting a project, managers can make sure the necessary skills are available within the organization by checking resource loads. Once the project starts, several reports are available to monitor progress and take corrective action as needed. Unlike many project portfolio systems that rely on data keyed in by a handful of people, the MatrixOne PLM platform aggregates data directly from the project team members, meaning executives can validate for themselves that deliverables are on time with necessary cross-functional reviews. Business Process Performance Even the best product portfolio ideas are doomed to failure unless product development is executing at optimal levels. The new MatrixOne Business Metrics Module(TM) offers a highly configurable reporting package to analyze the performance of the development process in real-time. Based on appropriate access rules, any user using the MatrixOne business process performance capability can create personal dashboards to track key time-based metrics about the creation, review and release of all product deliverables. In addition, these dashboards can be specialized for company executives, giving management the ability to quickly assess project performance to determine if product ROI thresholds will be met, exceeded, or fall short. MatrixOne Synchronous Engineering Solutions Electronics and Mechanical Design Management For many companies, the design process is characterized by frequent iterations and cross-functional meetings between electrical and mechanical engineers to assure that the finished product works as a single system. The MatrixOne PLM platform offers a focused Web-based application for design teams throughout the world to securely collaborate as a single virtual team. With MatrixOne synchronous engineering solutions, product engineering can aggregate design files from multiple tools into a single master design to insure consistency between design at the system and the assembly level, increase design re-use, promote early conceptual design with partners and decrease manufacturing errors from using out-dated designs. The change process supports the ability to execute hundreds of similar bill-of-material changes simultaneously -- and reports and automation enable all stakeholders in the change process to quickly make approvals so new part and design revisions are immediately available to the rest of the organization. In addition, with its semiconductor design management offerings, MatrixOne addresses a new and rapidly emerging market for PLM by directly connecting the semiconductor design environment to the extended enterprise for the first time. Together, the MatrixOne PLM platform and its Synchronicity(R) solutions enable global mechanical and electronics design teams (PCB, FPGA, and IC) to work together in real time with their development partners, customers and suppliers to reduce design and development costs, leverage design expertise, improve quality and accelerate time to market. Software Engineering With increased reliance on the software within a product, the potential for failure due to a glitch or development error grows as well. Unless the software designs of a product work together as one unified system with the electrical and mechanical designs, the product is at risk from the start. MatrixOne solves this problem by integrating to leading software management tools such as IBM Rational(R) ClearCase(R), so software engineers can continue working in their preferred environment while taking advantage of the broader product planning and development capabilities of the MatrixOne PLM platform (see previous press release for full description at http://www.matrixone.com/matrixone/press_releases_20050330_ clearcase.html). Due to the length of this URL, it may be necessary to copy and paste it into your Internet browser's URL address field. You may also need to remove an extra space in the URL if one exists. Bill-of-Material Cost Analytics The best product designs mean little if the product cannot be delivered at a cost the market will bear. The new MatrixOne Cost Analytics Module(TM) provides capabilities to track and analyze product cost against targets and profit margins. Organizations can understand the cost impact of change early in the product development process. Optional reverse auctions capabilities integrated with MatrixOne sourcing solutions allow competing suppliers to see how their response compares to others, which can drive the costs down even further. Manufacturing Bill-of-Material Management The new MatrixOne Manufacturing Bill-of-Materials Management Module(TM) allows companies to pursue a "build anywhere" manufacturing strategy with full traceability back to the engineering bill-of-materials. Manufacturing engineers are able to define plant-specific bills-of-material reflecting plant specific "make or buy" decisions that are independent of the engineering "design or purchase" decisions, manufacturing phantom parts, raw materials and the use of specific alternates, substitutes and/or MPNs at different locations. The release and subsequent revisions to the bill-of-materials are controlled by a manufacturing change order process that works in conjunction with the existing engineering change process for true "design for manufacturing" development. Material Environmental Compliance Companies, particularly those in the automotive and electronics markets, are faced with an onslaught of new environmental regulatory pressures, most notably those presented by the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE), Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) and End-of-Life Vehicle (ELV) regulations in Europe. These regulations are aimed at reducing the amount of hazardous materials in new products and ensuring that the materials are recyclable at the end of their product lifecycle. The new MatrixOne(R) Materials Compliance Central(TM) application provides capabilities for manufacturers to collect, organize, analyze and report detailed materials and substance data related to all new products. An integration to the IMDS 3.0 database is provided for End-of-Life Vehicle (ELV) compliance, along with enhanced RoHS and WEEE capabilities (see previous press release for full description at http://www.matrixone.com/matrixone/press_releases_20050124_mcc.html). Re-use and Knowledge Transfer Many companies need to increase design re-use in order to lower costs, but many efforts fail because search tools are inadequate and it is too cumbersome for users to make their work available to others. New, powerful full-text search capabilities in the MatrixOne PLM platform allow users to quickly locate product development content just by providing a few key-words about file content or metadata. Microsoft(R) Office applications have access to MatrixOne PLM storage as if it is a local drive on the end user's desktop. This makes it easy for end users to work in their Microsoft-based environment natively, saving their product documentation to MatrixOne -- and having it be there for others to retrieve at a later date. Availability The new MatrixOne PLM capabilities will be available with Matrix 10.6 in June 2005. About MatrixOne MatrixOne, Inc. (NASDAQ: MONE) is a recognized leader in delivering collaborative Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions. We provide flexible solutions that unleash the creative power of global value chains to inspire innovations and speed them to market. MatrixOne's customers include global leaders in the aerospace and defense, automotive, consumer products, high technology, life sciences, machinery, and the process industries, including Agilent Technologies, General Electric, Honda, Johnson Controls, Philips, Procter & Gamble, Siemens, and Toshiba. MatrixOne (http://www.matrixone.com/) is headquartered in Westford, Massachusetts with locations throughout North America, Europe, and Asia/Pacific. MatrixOne, the MatrixOne logo and Synchronicity are registered trademarks and "a leading provider of collaborative product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions for the value chain" and MatrixOne Materials Compliance Central are trademarks of MatrixOne, Inc. All other trademarks and service marks are the property of their respective owners. Forward-looking statements in this release are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. Such statements may relate, among other things, to our plans, objectives and expected financial and operating results. The risks and uncertainties that may affect forward-looking statements include, among others: poor product sales, long sales cycles, difficulty developing new products, difficulty in relationships with vendors and partners, higher risk in international operations, difficulty assimilating future acquisitions, difficulty managing rapid growth, and increased competition. For more about the risks and uncertainties of our business, see our periodic and other S.E.C. filings.