Cost Plus World Market Selects Yard Hound™ From PINC Solutions To Improve Supply Chain Operation Efficiency

Published 6th March 2008

BERKELEY, CA, February 25, 2008 – PINC Solutions, the leader in cost-effective real-time asset visibility technology, announced today that Cost Plus World Market (NASDAQ: CPWM) has selected and implemented PINC Solutions’ Yard Hound™ to track and manage their fleet trailers at World Market’s main Northern California Distribution Center.

Cost Plus World Market is a leading specialty retailer of casual home living and entertaining products. The company operates over 298 stores in 34 states and reported 2007 revenue over $1 billion.

“We are always looking for cost-effective ways to improve our supply chain,” said Ray Whitley, Senior Vice President, Supply Chain, at Cost Plus World Market. "PINC’s solution automates many of the yard management processes that were done manually. By using their system, we are able to keep track of our assets in the yard at all times, and share the information through a web-based interface. With a minimal amount of capital investment and virtually no disruption to our Distribution Center operation, we have improved our yard operation efficiency and cut costs.”

“PINC is pleased to enable World Market to accurately monitor and track their assets in real-time utilizing Yard Hound™, the latest embodiment of our patented RTLS-tracking technology,” said Aleks Göllü, CEO of PINC Solutions. “We empower our customers to streamline distribution yard operation with real-time visibility into all of their yard activities. Yard Hound™ can easily be incorporated into customer’s logistics management system as an overlay to existing processes, or be integrated with other Yard and Warehouse Management Systems that may be in use already. The asset location and status information is kept updated constantly with minimal human intervention, and the users have access to electronic record and can receive automated alerts and reports about their assets remotely anywhere, anytime.”

Built on an innovative combination of advanced sensor and passive RFID technologies as the RTLS platform, PINC's products represent a paradigm shift in mobile asset management through real-time asset visibility. Cost Plus World Market and other clients of PINC realize many benefits from Yard Hound, including

Increased yard operation efficiency
Improved yard truck and driver productivity and retention
Reduced manual yard checks
Increased yard throughput
Improved equipment utilization
Reduced late, demurrage and detention fees
Enhanced customer and vendor services
Additional features of Yard Hound™ such as real-time task assignment and acknowledgement for yard-truck drivers, and user-defined access to real-time visibility data for their 3PL providers and carriers, allow the customers to achieve further saving beyond the immediate return seen from their daily operation. The resulting improvements in economics typically generate a positive ROI for clients in less than a year.