Briefs

June 2, 2004. PEORIA, Ill. and TULSA, Okla. - Caterpillar Inc. (NYSE: CAT) and STATSOFT Inc., (www.statsoft.com), announced a collaboration to develop and market software solutions for the modeling, optimization and simulation of complex manufacturing processes.

These software solutions will be based on the integration of Caterpillar's patent-pending analytic processes into the industry-leading suite of STATISTICA enterprise analytics software. StatSoft will market and support the solutions, beginning in late 2004 or early 2005.

Caterpillar's cutting-edge analytic processes are used to effectively simulate, predict, and optimize the outcome of complex manufacturing processes. These analytic processes have been developed and validated at Caterpillar's Technical Center.

The software solutions are expected to allow organizations to:

• Simultaneously monitor large numbers of process parameters;
• Reduce time and expense by predicting likely failures before they actually occur in final product testing;
• Perform effective root-cause analysis for determining causes of quality or performance problems; and
• Enable "what-if" analyses and optimization.