Pantellos And Time Industrial Launch Pantellos Services Management

New Solution Provides Utilities with To-the-hour Reporting on Enterprise-wide Projects, Labor and Costs; Ensures Contract, Accounting and Regulatory Compliance

The Woodlands, TX and Houston, TX – February 3, 2004 – Pantellos, the leading electronic marketplace and supply chain services company for the utility and energy industries, today launched Pantellos Services Management, powered by Time Industrial, Inc., a premier outsourced contractor-time and cost-tracking service. Energy executives and project managers alike will now have a programmatic and consistent approach to real-time budgeting, workforce balancing and regulatory compliance for all managed tasks (tasks with a specific service scope and defined timeframe) across operations, business units and software applications.

The new solution integrates Pantellos’ deep utility expertise and Time Industrial’s proven cost-tracking service for contracted and internal resources in a solution that is specifically tailored to the energy industry’s project-based workload. Pantellos Service Management, powered by Time Industrial, will address the utility industry’s need to eradicate budget overruns, limit project delays, reduce accounting lags as well as prevent inconsistent contract enforcement and incomplete project-status reporting throughout managed task processes.

With the Pantellos Services Management solution, utilities can now track and manage internal and contract labor (regardless of skill set), material costs and accrued expenses in real-time on scheduled and unscheduled managed tasks, including transmission & distribution construction services, outage services, legal & consulting services, generation operations, vegetation management, meter reading and facility security across the enterprise. The new solution captures labor hours, equipment expenses, material costs and other project data in a centralized repository and automatically correlates that data against daily payroll, established billing rates by supplier, project budgets and timelines. With real-time data and electronic approvals of costs expended, the utility’s accounts payable system is automatically presented with approved payment requests to further reduce the amount of time and labor associated with invoice processing.

“Utilities typically allocate 60 percent of their budgets to procuring and managing services, making services management a cost category that deserves careful scrutiny to ensure that expenditures and inefficiencies are minimized,” said Jim Neikirk, president and CEO of Pantellos. “By partnering with Time Industrial, Pantellos is able to further deliver customer-centric solutions that help utilities proactively control and accurately account for flexible resources and improve their overall market competitiveness.”

Pantellos Services Management is XML-based and integrates with existing project management tools and enterprise applications so that data can be shared and aggregated in real-time. Project managers can now provide immediate and accurate reports to senior executives on project budget and status as well as facilitate compliance with governmental accounting requirements. Additional benefits include:

• Actionable job-cost control through real-time tracking


• Better utility-contractor relationships through faster payments and lower rates


• Elimination of rate overcharges and payment for hours not worked


• Intelligent bid management (contractor productivity assessment) on a go-forward basis

“We are excited to work with Pantellos to dramatically improve how the utility industry addresses its managed task activities,” said Evan Chrapko, president and CEO of Time Industrial, Inc. “Our proven contractor cost-control service, coupled with Pantellos’ deep industry knowledge and supply chain expertise, ensures that the utility industry receives the most comprehensive solution to contain and rationalize its managed task expenditures.”

Availability

Pantellos Services Management is available today and completes Pantellos' end-to-end labor force solutions set, which includes Pantellos Workforce Management. For more information, please visit: http://www.pantellos.com/services/spend_management/default.asp.

About Time Industrial

Time Industrial, Inc., a 12-year old company, provides the world’s only outsourced, turnkey suite of services for real-time capture of job costing and progress data for industrial projects at large power utility, oil and gas, chemical and other industrial plant sites. Time Industrial provides a single, easy point of collection for all job-site inputs: labor, equipment, materials and expenses. Agreed rates and prices, no matter how complex, are applied immediately and the data can be integrated into any project management or business system. Time Industrial reduces budget and schedule risks of industrial projects (new builds, refinery maintenance, shutdowns, re-powering and outages) by 2 - 15 percent, especially in situations involving multiple contractors or global operations. Time Industrial improves existing back office ERP systems, payroll and billing systems, and project management systems (e.g. SAP, Oracle Financials, PeopleSoft, Primavera’s P3 and P3/e, Microsoft’s Project or Excel, Timberline, Geac, Constructware, Meridian’s Prolog, J.D. Edwards, Maximo, Indus, CASP, Kronos and many others.) The Time Industrial business methods and the technology driving its service are patent pending. Time Industrial is a privately owned, venture-backed company with offices in the United States and Canada. http://www.timeindustrial.com.

About Pantellos

Pantellos is the leading supply chain services company for the utility and energy industries. Built by the industry, for the industry, Pantellos delivers deep industry knowledge and expertise around a broad suite of supply chain tools and services to its active trading community of more than 30 buyer and 500 supplier companies. Pantellos Marketplace solutions enable customers to electronically transact on a host of direct and indirect goods and services through either direct integration with its Marketplace or via managed Web solutions. Since inception, utilities have used Pantellos to source, procure and manage more than 100 categories of products and services. Pantellos supply chain services include: supply management services, enterprise sourcing services, services management solutions, electronic settlement solutions and program implementation.

Established in 2000 by some of North America’s largest utilities, Pantellos founders include: American Electric Power (NYSE: AEP); Cinergy (NYSE: CIN); Consolidated Edison, Inc. (NYSE: ED); Dominion Resources (NYSE: D); DTE Energy (NYSE: DTE); Duke Energy (NYSE: DUK); Edison International (NYSE: EIX); El Paso Energy (NYSE: EPG); Entergy (NYSE: ETR); Exelon (NYSE: EXC); FirstEnergy Corp. (NYSE: FE); FPL Group (NYSE: FPL); Ontario Power Generation; PG&E Corp. (NYSE: PCG); Progress Energy (NYSE: PGN); Public Service Enterprise Group (NYSE: PEG); Reliant Energy (NYSE: REI); Sempra Energy (NYSE: SRE); Southern Company (NYSE: SO); and TXU (NYSE: TXU). Pantellos is based in The Woodlands, Texas, USA. For more information, please visit: http://www.pantellos.com.