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<%=company1%> today announced that Alcan Aluminum Corporation, the U.S. subsidiary of Alcan Aluminium Ltd. (Alcan) (Stock Symbol: AL), has selected Camstar's InSite manufacturing execution system (MES) for use in its North American Sheet Products Division. With worldwide sales of $9 billion annually, Alcan is a global leader in the production and marketing of aluminum products. InSite will be used by Alcan to track work-in-process inventory and detailed product flow at the factory level, connecting plant floor operations to Alcan's Oracle ERP (enterprise resource planning) and Rockwell Software RSView32 HMI (human-machine interface) applications. Alcan has selected AnswerThink Consulting Group as the integration partner for this project.

The deployment of InSite is part of Alcan's Full Business Potential (FBP) program, aimed at improving its underlying profitability through optimizing returns from existing assets such as equipment, systems, people, and technology. "Our directive under Alcan's earnings improvement program is to use commercially available technology to improve shareholder returns," said Dave Sacco, Director of Information Technology at Alcan Sheet Products. "We looked very closely at the operational improvements that would be derived from deployment of Camstar's MES, and we were able to present a solid business case, with very real dollar benefits, for implementing InSite as the heart of our new systems architecture."

Initial deployment of InSite will be at Alcan's Warren, Ohio Aluminum Sheet Fabrication plant, which is one of seven production sites operated in North America by Alcan's Sheet Products Group. The Warren plant is part of Alcan's integrated supply chain that brings aluminum products to the marketplace, producing sheet metal for use in the manufacture of aluminum cans and automotive products. "Deployment of InSite at Warren will represent a major upgrade to that facility's systems," says Mike DeAlba, Automation Leader for Alcan's Sheet Products Group. "With InSite in place we expect to see a reduction in customer returns, increases in our recovery and productivity rates, and vastly improved visibility into our inventory and ordering positions."

Warren Plant Manager Mervyn Bell concurs, adding that "With InSite we are creating an integrated shop-floor-to-top floor manufacturing environment that will increase visibility into our inventory and ordering positions, and will serve as a showcase for all our other plants. The anticipated increases in productivity, together with the tighter controls we will have over product quality, will enable us to run the plant more efficiently and profitably while simultaneously increasing overall customer satisfaction."

"Our selection criteria for MES was carefully specified in the architectural definition we created for this project," says Alcan's Sacco, "and Camstar's InSite was clearly the best choice for satisfying our requirements. Of primary importance to us was that the MES selected would have an adaptive architecture that would allow us to support our manufacturing and business processes in the future. We like InSite's component-based architecture, which gives us the ability to easily add our own functionality and integrate with our other plant and enterprise systems. We were also impressed by Camstar's sixteen year history of successful MES implementations."

Founded in 1984, Camstar Systems, Inc. supplies its manufacturing execution system (MES) software to the semiconductor, electronics, textiles, paper, metals, and food markets, as well as to other industries for which tracking, traceability, quality data collection, and process control are mission-critical to corporate success. The company offers and supports two distinct MES products - MESA for the IBM AS/400 series and InSite for Microsoft's Windows NT platform. Camstar Systems, Inc. is located at 900 E. Hamilton Ave., Suite 400, Campbell, CA 95008, 408/559-5700, Fax: 408/558-9350, http://www.camstar.com.

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