eWorkOrder Streamlines Maintenance at The Children’s Place

Automated Invoice Processing Key to a Successful Implementation

San Diego, CA, May 11, 2005 -- Big Sky Technologies Inc. is pleased to announce the addition of The Children’s Place Retail Stores, Inc. (NASDAQ:PLCE) as a new eWorkOrder customer. After a successful trial, eWorkOrder was rolled out to assist in managing store maintenance for all 753 store locations for The Children’s Place. The system has been fully operational since mid February of this year.

The Children's Place is a growing specialty retailer of apparel and accessories for children from newborn to twelve years of age. The company designs, sources and markets their products under “The Children's Place” brand name for sale exclusively in their stores. Their merchandising objective is to provide their customers with high-quality, fashionable products at prices that represent substantial value relative to their competitors.

eWorkOrder is a retail facility management system designed and hosted by Big Sky Technologies, Inc. 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 access for facility managers, store managers and contractors. A flexible design allows eWorkOrder to be easily integrated with existing call centers and accounting systems.

The Children’s Place store managers use eWorkOrder’s Interactive Voice Response capabilities to report problems, check the status of existing maintenance requests, and to rate the maintenance services performed in their stores. The Children’s Place vendors use eWorkOrder’s web interface to acknowledge work orders, update work order status, and to submit electronic invoices for completed work.

“eWorkOrder has allowed the Facility Maintenance Department to better communicate with our field personnel and vendors. It has significantly improved our work order tracking capability and has allowed us to create a complete audit trail form the inception of the work request to job completion and invoicing,” said Patrick Guerra, Senior Manager of Facilities and Utility Management for The Children’s Place. “The system allows us to identify exceptions to the process and focus our efforts on them rather than the entire process.”

eWorkOrder’s automated invoicing capability has met the needs of The Children’s Place in several key ways: vendors offload in house clerical loads by submitting invoices electronically through the system; Customer Service Representatives easily reconcile and approve invoices on line; and invoices are electronically coded with appropriate GL account codes before being exported directly to the Lawson accounting system for payment. By automating the invoicing process from “end to end”, The Children’s Place significantly reduced the manpower required to manually process them.

Additional reporting capabilities have also been added to eWorkOrder to meet the expanded reporting needs of the full maintenance workgroup at The Children’s Place. In addition to the ad hoc reporting capability that is an integral part of eWorkOrder, several new reports have been added, including an Accrual Report, Rolling Operating Forecast and Cost Variance Report. The Children’s Place uses these reports to manage their ongoing maintenance costs and to determine areas that need attention. The Accrual Report is also used as a data feed and is imported directly into the Lawson accounting system, significantly improving the accuracy of maintenance accrual information.

“Big Sky’s ability to tailor eWorkOrder to communicate with our in-house accounting system has already saved our accounting department countless hours normally required to enter and code invoices, as well as to determine accurate accrual information,” said Paul Santini, Senior Director, Financial Systems. “Accuracy and timeliness are key to successfully meeting our corporate goals and the functionality and controls implemented within eWorkOrder provide us with a very valuable extension of our internal financial systems.”

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.