INDUSTRY

MicroStrategy Incorporated, a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence software, today announced that DuPont Crop Protection Products has selected the MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform for enterprise-wide reporting and analysis. DuPont Crop Protection Products is a global leader in delivering science-based solutions in the areas of materials, products and technologies. DuPont Crop Protection Products will harness the MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform for sales analysis and reporting across the enterprise. DuPont, with approximately 130 production plants and more than 70 laboratories for research and development, operates in more than 70 countries. Of the most innovative materials released from DuPont laboratories are: Teflon(R), Nomex(R), Kevlar(R) and Lycra(R). DuPont Italy has more than 350 collaborators and generates approximately 800 million euros in annual revenues. The agreement, signed at an international level, will allow DuPont Crop Protection Products in Italy to improve the management of orders and enable constant monitoring of the sales process. DuPont Crop Protection Products Italy has experimented during recent years with different systems of business intelligence to gain insight from enterprise-wide data. The first step towards consolidating business information for DuPont Crop Protection Products was in 1987 with the creation of a system that enabled orders to be sent via PCs connected by telephone lines. Later, after the creation of a statistical system capable of monitoring sales processes, orders and discounts, DuPont Crop Protection Products advanced towards systems of business intelligence. The choice of Dupont Italy to adopt MicroStrategy -- thereby aligning itself to the international standard for the division of DuPont Crop Protection Products -- completes its search for a flexible, scalable and high- performing information system. The system enables users to perform detailed analysis of sales operations with respect to predefined criteria: product, client, or period. It provides campaign analysis for selected time periods and allows contrasts between historical and actual data. Additionally, managers may access 'rapid' reports to verify company results and make comparisons with previous periods. "The management of sales processes and the communication of information between field sales and local headquarters is fundamental to our requirements. MicroStrategy is capable, with its Web-based and scalable platform, of resolving all analytical and reporting requirements," said Enrico Cattaneo, Financial and Business Services Manager of DuPont Crop Protection Products for Italy. "Within the general organization of DuPont Italy," continues Cattaneo, "the division of 'Crop Protection Products' has particularly complex issues with sales operations due to seasonal variations of the crops. The variations in climate in Italy allow for the cultivation of a vast range of agricultural products, making the Italian catalogue of DuPont Crop Protection Products one of the richest, with more than 120 different products. The implementation of MicroStrategy is central to the improvement of our business." "We're very happy to put our software at the disposition of DuPont Crop Protection Products," said Andrea Delvo, Country Manager for MicroStrategy Italy. "We're particularly proud that our platform is being used to replace certain existing software of our competitors because of our capacity to better manage complex criteria."