2009 Sage Customer Award Winners

Honors Luncheon: A Tribute to Sage Customers Featuring the 2009 Award Winners

2008 Award Winner

2008 Award Winner

Welcome to the Honors Luncheon: A Tribute to Sage Customers The Honors Luncheon provides customers like you the opportunity to be recognized for your innovation, loyalty, success, unique customizations, and overall achievement through the use of Sage solutions. Sage will present six Customer Awards in the following categories: Rookie of the Year – Recognizes a new customer who has achieved and exceeded their stated objectives, establishing a new trajectory for their organization. Best Use of Customization – Recognizes a customer who has best configured and/or customized their Sage application to align with the business objective sought. Community Stewardship – Recognizes an organization that emphasizes the local, national, or global community in an effort to better the lives of those in the communities. Innovation – Recognizes the extraordinary achievement of a customer that has adopted Sage applications as an enterprise-class solution for their industry. Best End-to-End Deployment – Recognizes the outstanding achievement of a customer who has integrated two (or more) Sage applications and realized synergies from the combined result. Lifetime Achievement – Recognizes organizations that have utilized Sage to achieve or exceed their stated business objectives for 10 years or more.

2008 Award Winner

The Customer Awards Selection Process Nominations were held this past summer. Sage would like to give special thanks to our independent judges who evaluated the finalists for each award and selected the award winners. Paul Clolery is vice president and editorial director of NPT Publishing Group, which publishes The NonProfit Times and its sister publication, Exempt magazine. He also has oversight responsibilities for the editorial content of The NonProfit Times Online, the e-newsletters NPT Weekly, NPT Instant Fundraising, NPT TechnoBuzz and NPTJobs. He has been honored four times for reporting excellence, including an Associated Press (AP) Managing Editors award. Clolery has also written freelance articles for ID World, Investor’s Business Daily, Working Woman, and others. Denis Pombriant has been researching and writing about CRM and ondemand computing since January 2000. He was the first analyst to cover on-demand computing as a beat. Among his other accomplishments, Denis Pombriant is the author of “The New Garage,” a 2004 white paper that first laid out the blueprint for Cloud Computing. In 2004 Pombriant founded the Beagle Research Group, LLC, an analyst and consulting firm dedicated to CRM and front office issues. Denis is well known in the CRM community and frequently posts his insights on his blog as well as a variety of industry Web properties including Destination CRM, Search CRM, CRM Buyer, and CRM Magazine, where he is a member of the editorial board of advisers. He has been quoted in all CRM industry outlets as well as Forbes, Fortune, The Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal. He is now working on a book. Ramon Ray is editor and technology evangelist for Smallbiztechnology.com, and author of Technology Solutions for Growing Businesses (Amacom). He has also written technology articles for many other publications, including: Inc. magazine, Cnet.com, VARBusiness, TechTarget, Entrepreneur.com, and Small Business Resources. Ray is often quoted in the media on small business issues, including Entrepreneur Magazine, Inc. magazine, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and CNBC’s The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch.

Rookie of the Year_ _________________________________ Coilhose Pneumatics East Brunswick, NJ Sage MAS 500 Sage Business Partner: Net@Work Coilhose Pneumatics is the industry’s leading manufacturer of air tool accessories and air line controls. From hose and tubing to blowguns and quick disconnects, they have been delighting customers since 1969. Prior to Sage, they were looking for a new ERP system that could unify their two separate companies and they found it with Sage MAS 500. Product costing is now automated and booking inter-company transactions is a snap.

Best Use of Customization_ ___________________________ Metropolitan Regional Information Systems Rockville, MD Sage MAS 500 Sage Business Partner: Blytheco Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, Inc. (MRIS) is a leading real estate information technology company and the largest multiple listing service in the nation. MRIS’ core market is comprised of several states in the Mid-Atlantic region. In the past year alone, MRIS’ comprehensive collection of services and products facilitated the sale of over $36 billion dollars in real estate sales throughout the MRIS coverage area. In 2006, MRIS upgraded its legacy accounting systems to Sage MAS500. MRIS worked with Blytheco LLC to develop and implement automated processes that simplified the entire customer invoicing and payment cycle. In 2009, MRIS launched an online payment service for its customers that integrated with Sage MAS500. Since March 2009, over 32,000 customers have used the system to pay their MRIS bills. As MRIS continues to automate its processes, they expect Sage will continue to provide the stability and scalability to make this possible.

Community Stewardship_ ____________________________ Teach For America New York, NY Sage SalesLogix Sage Business Partner: Infinity Info Systems Teach for America’s mission is to build the movement to eliminate educational inequity by enlisting our nation’s most promising future leaders in the effort. They are the national corps of outstanding recent college graduates of all academic majors and career interests who commit two years to teach in urban and rural public schools and become leaders in the effort to expand educational opportunity. Prior to their Sage implementation, Teach For America did not have a centralized system to track prospective candidates in the field. Their recruiting efforts were further complicated by the fact that each recruiter developed their own personal methods to track candidates and new recruiters had to choose and design their own recruitment tools. Teach For America saw dramatic improvements in their recruitment efforts after implementing Sage SalesLogix. They have now standardized their recruitment processes resulting in a stronger applicant pool through more targeted and effective recruiting as is evidence by their increase in percentage of corps members achieving the highest level of academic gains. Teach For America received more than 35,000 applications for the 2009 corps, a new record, marking an increase of 42 percent over the prior year.

Innovation ___________________________________________ Entertainment Lighting Services, Inc. Sun Valley, CA Sage MAS 500 Sage Business Partner: Information Integration Group, Inc. Entertainment Lighting Services, Inc. is a leading supplier of lighting and staging equipment, providing technologically advanced lighting equipment for rental and sales, as well as a full range of production services. Since 1991, they have been serving the needs of a wide variety of industries including television, theatre, film, and red carpet media events. Prior to their Sage implementation, Entertainment Lighting Services was searching for a completely integrated system that could handle their unique industry requirements in accounting for rental and sales inventories as well as labor scheduling. They found their

solution with Sage MAS 500. They now have a comprehensive system that helped reduce their inventory shrinkage by 50% while the month-end close process was reduced from 4 weeks to 5 days—all while experiencing significant growth in revenues.

Best End-to-End Deployment__________________________ Power Curbers, Inc. Salisbury, NC Sage MAS 500, Sage FAS, Sage SalesLogix Sage Business Partner: Practical Software Solutions Power Curbers, Inc. is a 55-year-old family-owned company in Salisbury, NC. They manufacture machinery for slip forming concrete curb-and-gutter, highway safety barrier, bridge parapet, monolithic curb, gutter and sidewalk, irrigation ditches, and other special applications. Prior to their Sage implementation, Power Curbers was using a difficult ERP system and found they were spending more time managing the system than using the information. They turned to Sage and implemented Sage MAS 500, Sage FAS, and Sage SalesLogix. As a result of this end to end implementation, our award recipient has transitioned to a pull inventory system using just-in-time manufacturing processes and doubled their inventory turns in just 12 months. Their sales staff can now configure a custom built machine in less than 3 minutes while the company can allocate the cost of materials to each specific order—all while reducing their month-end close process from 14 days to less than 3 days.

Lifetime Achievement________________________________ Amix Salvage & Sales Ltd. Surrey, BC Sage Accpac, SageCRM Sage Business Partner: Plus Computer Solutions Ltd. Amix Salvage & Sales Ltd. is a salvage industry leader in dismantling and demolition projects. The have been in the salvage industry for over 30 years and own and operate barges, tugs, and an inventory of specialized scrap handling equipment. As the largest scrap metal recycler in British Columbia they move thousands of tons of material quickly and efficiently by truck, rail, and sea.

Amix Salvage & Sales has been using Sage solutions for over 17 years and during this time they have experienced a variety of unique market challenges including massive volatility in commodity prices, world wide economic troubles, and the growing demand for recycled metals in new markets overseas. As the market has changed our award recipient’s processes have changed as well. Since their initial DOS implementation, they have now grown to use Sage Accpac which has helped automate or eliminate many of their old manual processes such as the manual time entry for payroll, which saved 15 hours each week. In addition, real-time perpetual inventory has saved 10 hours per month by eliminating the need for retail store workers to research inventory levels.

Congratulations to this year’s Sage Customer Awards winners!

Congratulations to the MyBizCounts.com Contest Winner! Indie Peace has won the MyBizCounts.com contest! Contest participants were challenged to create a brief video commercial for their business idea or new business, along with their business plan and a brief essay. Based on online votes, the 20 most popular videos advanced to a final judging round and were evaluated by a panel of small business experts. Atlanta-based Indie Peace, a socially conscious clothing manufacturer, secured top honors. Their tagline, “Make a mark without leaving one,” suits, as they use only environmentally friendly fabrics and dyes, made in the USA. Well done, Indie Peace!

Thank you… …for your loyalty and outstanding achievements. The Customer Awards are for you—our valued customers.

©2009 Sage Software, Inc. All rights reserved. The Sage logo and the Sage product and service names mentioned herein are registered trademarks or trademarks of Sage Software, Inc. or its affiliated entities. 09-19475 11/09