Press and Analyst contacts: For Immediate Release

Tim Simmons
Stirling Douglas Group
905.477.8700
tsimmons@stirlingdouglas.com

Ron Margulis
RAM Communications
908.232.3230
ramcommunications@home.com

Stirling Douglas Group Releases SDG WEB-Store® to
Boost Retail Marketing Effectiveness

NEW YORK, January 14, 2001 -- Stirling Douglas Group, Toronto, announced today at the National Retail Federation Annual Conference the launch of SDG Web-Store® , a new system that enables store management teams to make better decisions with the clear information based on science rather than just gut feel.

SDG Web-Store allows retailers to give all levels of management -- from store level through headquarters -- access to Web-based inquiries and analytics from a consolidated warehouse of consistent business metrics. The initial application enables store management to view their sales data, inventory, forecast and suggested order level quantities for each item and gives the managers the opportunity to override and add to the order. The clear benefit for retailers is now they have an easy-to-use audit tool that combines the science of the forecasting and replenishment with the experience of the store manager.

"Retailers have long needed a tool that allows them to manage business processes built to handle more granular merchandising and promotional strategies. The faster they can accomplish this, the better they're able to take advantage of market trends and new product introductions, as well as manage replenishment and seasonal sell-through to meet their objectives," explained Tim Simmons, Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Stirling Douglas Group.

"SDG Web Store was built to give retailers these precise capabilities, plus it uses their suppliers' knowledge of local conditions, causal factors and other trends in developing assortment planning, master promotions schedules, and other demand-generating programs keyed to local market developments."

SDG Web Store gives retailers far greater ability to influence store-level performance by providing common processes and analytics to manage assortments, promotion schedules, assortment turnover schedules, markdowns, and labor schedules to the optimal level -- whether department, store, or zone. Giving store and enterprise management better tools to see and influence store- and category-level performance will improve same store sales and margin growth, associate performance, space productivity and supplier performance.

About Stirling Douglas Group
Stirling Douglas Group (SDG), www.stirlingdouglas.com is headquartered in Toronto, Canada and is the world leader in SKU/Store Level consumer demand forecasting engines. Sixteen years of forecasting systems development on mainframe, client server and now web enabled, has made SDG's PREDICT^TM demand forecasting engine the world's most accurate for baseline and promotion uplift. SDG's expertise extends to forecast based replenishment, PROMPT^TM, and forecast based planning, MAPS^TM. All SDG software is platform independent.