Big Sky Welcomes Peet's Coffee & Tea as a New eWorkOrder Customer

Integration Capabilities were the Key to a Successful Rollout at Peet's

San Diego, CA, October 4, 2004 -- Big Sky Technologies Inc. is pleased to announce the successful implementation of eWorkOrder for Peet's Coffee & Tea, Inc. (NASDAQ:PEET). Peet's Facility Managers have now been on-line and using eWorkOrder for several months.

Founded in Berkeley, Calif. in 1966, Peet's Coffee & Tea, Inc. is a specialty coffee roaster and marketer of fresh, deep-roasted whole bean coffee for home and office enjoyment. Peet's operates 83 company-owned stores in 7 states in addition to several distribution channels including specialty grocery and gourmet food stores, online and mail order, office and restaurant accounts.

eWorkOrder is a retail facility management system designed and hosted by Big Sky to automate facility maintenance workflow and work order processing. Featuring telephone, web browser and e-mail access to a centralized maintenance database, eWorkOrder provides anytime anywhere management by facility managers, store managers and contractors. A flexible design allows eWorkOrder to be easily integrated with existing call centers and back end accounting and reporting systems.

Peet's strives to improve the quality of their stores while keeping costs under tight control. With the ongoing addition of new stores, Peet's facility management team looked to Big Sky's eWorkOrder to streamline their maintenance process and to handle the increasing load of maintenance requests. Peet's also wanted to keep their existing call center and request tracking system in place. To meet this requirement, Big Sky integrated eWorkOrder with Peet's request tracking system to allow new work requests to be added to the eWorkOrder database automatically. Additionally, eWorkOrder sends all status updates, comments, and work completion information back to Peet's request tracking system.

"By providing a two way interface with eWorkOrder, our call center technicians can provide immediate status back to store managers inquring about outstanding work orders. This has allowed us to maintain the high level of customer service we are known for while making the maintenance process much more efficient." said Mike Cloutier, Vice President of Information Services and Chief Technology Officer for Peet's. "Big Sky has been easy to work with and very responsive to our requirements."

Another problem facing Peet's was the management of the large amount of equipment used in their stores. Everything from coffee machines to music systems must be tracked and managed. eWorkOrder's Asset Tracking feature was configured to meet the requirement, and now work history is tracked for every piece of equipment in Peet's stores. "Carefully tracking maintenance on our equipment is key to keeping our costs down since we can quickly determine if a piece of equipment is under warranty or has been serviced recently," commented Catherine Christian, Director of Facility Management for Peet's. "It also assists us with the scheduling and implementation of an effective preventive maintenance program."

As new features are added to eWorkOrder, Peet's Coffee & Tea and other eWorkOrder customers benefit from the fact that eWorkOrder is a hosted solution. "As we continue to enhance the system we are able to roll out new features quickly and with minimal impact. No on site support is required and no software updates need to be sent to our customers, " said Bill Doll, CEO of Big Sky Technologies. "For example, we have just added an Invoice Management feature which allows contractors to enter invoices on-line and import consolidated invoice files directly into eWorkOrder. This new feature will be available to all customers as soon as the next version release is "turned on".

To find out more about Big Sky's eWorkOrder, please visit http://www.bigskytech.com/eworkorder.

About Big Sky Technologies
Big Sky is a leading supplier of application software that enhances communications across the business enterprise or within specialized workgroups. Big Sky focuses on application solutions that utilize the corporate data network, public telephone network, and Internet to provide anytime, anywhere access to centralized information. Big Sky provides self-service solutions for unified messaging, human resource, customer support, and facility management. For more information, please visit http://www.bigskytech.com.

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eWorkOrder trademark of Big Sky Technologies, Inc. Other company, product or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.