Santa Clara, Calif., - March 18, 2004 - SigmaQuest, Inc., a leader in Product Performance Intelligence, announced that Nader Fathi, President and CEO, will be featured speaker at the Institute of Supply Management of Silicon Valley .   This event is widely attended by supply management professionals and high-tech executives.   For more information, visit http://www.supplyknowledge.com

Fathi is scheduled to present on Thursday, April 8, 2004, at 5:30 p.m. at The Hilton Santa Clara , 4949 Great America Parkway, Santa Clara, California.   He will discuss the importance of closed-loop management of product quality in a distributed operating environment.

Synopsis of Presentation:

Electronics industry continues its march toward design anywhere, build anywhere and service anywhere.  It is increasingly difficult to have instant visibility to product quality impacted by globally distributed and outsourced design, manufacturing, repair and supplier sites. Test and diagnostic data lives through the entire product lifecycle and drives how well a product performs to specification.  Real-time access and control of this data - Product Performance Intelligence - is necessary for all OEMs and EMS providers to meet the quality and time-to-market objectives.  Product Performance Intelligence (PPI) solutions are needed to bridge the "visibility gap" and act as the collaboration platform between distributed design, manufacturing, supplier and field repair organizations created by the de-verticalization of the electronics industry. Data for PPI must be accurate and available at the right level of granularity for each organization involved in the process.  For example, a test result may be a specific parametric value as well as pass/fail, and the result must be available at the component, PCB and system level for proper correlation and corrective action.  Collecting consistent data across organizations and different companies with heterogeneous IT environments, and making the data available in real-time for distributed teams, requires new collaborative technologies that are not dependent upon existing software and hardware infrastructures.  Providing such capabilities enables real-time PPI across global environments throughout the product lifecycle.  This could also provide a critical quality metric for measuring the performance of the manufacturing partner as a supplier to an OEM organization.

About Institute for Supply Management

Founded in 1915, the Institute for Supply Management(TM) is the largest supply management institute in the world as well as one of the most respected. ISM's mission is to lead the supply management profession through its standards of excellence, research, promotional activities and education. ISM's membership base includes more than 45,000 supply management professionals with a network of domestic and international affiliated associations. ISM is a not-for-profit institute that provides opportunities for the promotion of the profession and the expansion of professional skills and knowledge. www.ism.ws

About SigmaQuest

SigmaQuest, a leader in Product Performance Intelligence, is the first to enable global visibility to test and quality data for electronic systems manufacturing. The company's revolutionary "any-data, any-tester, anywhere" technology supports automated test and quality data management and analysis across multiple geographies, test equipment suppliers, and extended supply chain members. Original equipment manufacturers and contract manufacturers achieve lower materials costs, lower manufacturing and support costs, and faster time to revenue.