Fall COMMON, San Antonio, TX – September 21, 1997 – The Standard Products Company of Detroit, MI has selected Nexgen’s Focus/2000 automatic conversion tool to century-enable its BPCS® manufacturing and distribution software at 27 sites across the United States, in Canada, Brazil, England, and France, today announces Rick Halsten, Nexgen President and General Manager.

"Standard Products has a large investment in Versions 3.1 and 4.0 of System Software Associates’ Business Production and Control System. They are not upgrading to BPCS® Version 6, which is century-enabled, and our solution allows them to quickly and easily convert their legacy code to handle the year 2000," Halsten explains.

Halsten reports that a Nexgen consultant spent a week in July at Standard Products’ Cleveland, Ohio data center to kick off the conversion project. Later in the summer, Nexgen conducted a week-long training session for company representatives from the U.S. and abroad. The conversion work will be completed by company employees and, at certain sites, by Nexgen consultants.

Greg Dalton, Manager of Distributed Systems for Standard Products, remarked that "So far everything we've seen has been very positive. We looked at several other vendors and we found Focus/2000 to be the best alternative for correcting our year 2000 problem. The Nexgen consultant, Kathy Neff, has been outstanding; I'm very impressed with her professionalism and knowledge."

Three Sites Live and More BPCS® conversions in process

Halsten notes that sales of Nexgen’s Focus/2000 have been very strong. "We and our distributors in the United States, England, France, Italy and Asia/Pacific have contracts to convert 74 sites around the world, using our automatic conversion tool," he says. "Plus, our sales pipelines are full and we expect activity to heat up as the year 2000 nears. The effectiveness and efficiency of our approach is demonstrated by the fact that we already have three client sites that have gone live with their Focus/2000-converted systems."

Close to 8,000 sites worldwide rely on the BPCS® manufacturing and distribution software to run their businesses. Without Focus/2000, clients who are not already live on BPCS® Version 6 (which is year 2000 compliant) face a formidable challenge. Version 6 introduced a radically different set of architectures (client/server, partially object-oriented) which many clients cannot implement without considerable expenditures of time and money. Alternatively, clients who wish to stay on their current version of the software would have a significant undertaking to century-enable their systems manually or using a less robust tool solution. As an example, BPCS® Version 4.05 has approximately 2,000 database files, 1,200 CL programs, and 1,600 RPG programs in which dates must be fixed. Since most companies have modified BPCS® , the number of programs and files is even greater. Nexgen developed Focus/2000 to automate the task.

This high level of automation—combined with professional services from experienced BPCS® professionals at Nexgen and its distributors—reduces the project turnaround to weeks or months instead of the years many users have budgeted.

The Standard Products Company is headquartered in Detroit, Michigan. The company manufactures plastic and rubber moldings used in the automotive industry. Subsidiary companies include Oliver Rubber Co., Holm Industries, Union Trucking Company, Westborn Service Center, and 5 Rubber Corporation.

Nexgen Software Technologies, Inc. is headquartered in Naperville, Illinois, a Chicago suburb in the area’s High Technology Corridor. Since 1990, Nexgen has focused on providing implementation and custom modification services to BPCS® users. Nexgen/2K, Inc. and Nexgen Asia/Pacific, Inc. were founded in 1997 to market Focus/2000 as a millennium solution for the BPCS® market and Nexgen/2K as a millennium solution for other AS/400 software. For more information, contact Rick Halsten at +1 (630)300-6000, via fax at +1 (630)300-6122, or via email at halsten@mail.nexgeninfo.com.

Focus/2000 and Nexgen/2K are trademarks of Nexgen/2K, Inc.

*BPCS® is a trademark of System Software Associates, Inc.