BUFFALO GROVE, IL and EDISON, NJ -- May 6, 2004 -- GraphiteStore.com, Inc., a leading online provider of composite carbon, graphite and ceramic products, and OpenRules, Inc. announced today that OpenRules™, the first open source full-scale business rules framework, will enhance GraphiteStore’s online marketplace.  OpenRules will support marketing promotions and improve cross-selling and up-selling capabilities of GraphiteStore.com, creating a better user experience while improving time-to-market of GraphiteStore’s products and services.

Looking for a solution that would make the manufacturing and retail processes more flexible and responsive while leveraging its current IT infrastructure, GraphiteStore recognized earlier that its online operations will require a Business Rule Engine. Such engine will allow the business logic that is embedded in business applications to be represented as rules that can be managed by business users, improving product configuration and accelerating investment in business process management. However, the analysis of the commercial business rules engines had shown that the most of them do not fit GraphiteStore’s requirements being unnecessary complicated, difficult to integrate in the GraphiteStore’s .Net environment, and prohibitively expensive. The analysis of the capabilities of the new open source business rule engine OpenRules™ had shown that this product along with the services provided by OpenRules, Inc. will deliver a practical, comprehensive while inexpensive solution for the GraphiteStore’s needs.

With OpenRules in place, GraphiteStore will empower business managers to configure dynamic stores, in which different combinations of products can be offered to customers based on their practical needs, shopping experience, and in simple customized manner. 

“Using OpenRules, we will be able to easily and flexibly adjust and fine-tune our product lines and processes without making changes in the system software,” said Vladimir Novokhovsky, GraphiteStore’s general manager.  “With OpenRules, we express our business rules in an intuitive format using just MS Excel familiar to any business specialist. No learning of any new tools or languages is required. Therefore, rules can be easily changed by business specialists without IT involvement. This enables GraphiteStore not only to be more efficient, but also to be more responsive to the constantly changing and expanding product lines.”

OpenRules, Inc. expects that after an initial OpenRules™ deployment as a part of GraphiteStore.com, the product will also enable other manufacturers and retailers in global trade to configure, maintain and change their business processes with increased agility in response to business growth and other dynamic business demands.

About GraphiteStore.com
GraphiteStore.com is a specialized online marketplace servicing industry professionals in a multitude of applications requiring strength, thermal conductivity, electrical resistance and friction properties of carbon and graphite. GraphiteStore.com currently operates 17 stores that offer highly sophisticated, application specific products and solutions for Aerospace, Automotive, Chemical, Petrochemical, Mining, Aluminum, Steel, Glass, Semiconductor, etc. industries. GraphiteStore.com, Inc. headquarters are based in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, and can be found on the Web at http://www.graphitestore.com.

About OpenRules
OpenRules, Inc. is a NJ-based corporation whose specialists are known to many leading US businesses as experts in developing practical decision support applications using business rules, optimization, and workflow technologies. OpenRules, Inc. is the company that develops, supports and markets the OpenRules™ product and provides related consulting and training services.  For more details, please visit http://www.openrules.com/.

GraphiteStore is a trademark of GraphiteStore.com, Inc. OpenRules is a trademark of OpenRules, Inc. All other trademarks are the properties of their respective owners.