Cambridge, April 26th 2006

News Release

KEY MILESTONE FOR GRANTA’S ENGINEERING ENTERPRISE SOLUTION

New GRANTA MI release enables ‘best practice’ materials information management

Granta Design has announced a new release of GRANTA MI™, the leading system for materials information management in engineering enterprises. This new version, the first since the software was launched, incorporates improvements and new features prioritized by the Material Data Management Consortium (MDMC), a collaborative project of world-leading engineering organizations. The result reinforces GRANTA MI’s position as a uniquely fast, robust, and functional enterprise system.

Key advances in GRANTA MI 1.1 include:

• Significant speed-ups in data searching, access, and analysis, particularly for large numbers of users.
• Improved user experience and reporting based on user feedback. GRANTA MI is easier than ever to use for key tasks such as comparing materials.
• Better integration with third-party tools such as the computer-aided engineering systems used by design engineers.
• New features in searching, enhanced control over corporate data, and extended and refined external reference databases.

The accurate, efficient, and secure use of data about materials such as alloys and composites is essential to engineering businesses. Yet few have successfully implemented systems to ensure best practice in managing and applying such data. The MDMC identifies and solves key challenges limiting this best practice, guiding development of GRANTA MI.

GRANTA MI creates a single corporate information resource for internal testing and design data and external references. Materials experts use GRANTA MI to manage and analyze this data, creating certified information such as fatigue curves that they then publish in a secure and controlled manner. Engineers and other professionals access and apply this information, for example in product design, assured that it is relevant, traceable, and the best available.

Regular updates, such as GRANTA MI 1.1, deliver new features and performance improvements while keeping pace with changing systems requirements. This removes the need for organizations to invest in-house IT resources in keeping their materials information system up-to-date.

“Our strategy is to build on GRANTA MI’s position as the pre-eminent solution designed specifically for materials information management in engineering enterprises,“ says Dr David Cebon, Managing Director at Granta. “GRANTA MI 1.1 is a key milestone in that strategy, and we are working with the MDMC and other customers to follow it up with further advances in the coming months.”

LINKS TO FURTHER INFORMATION:

GRANTA MI product information: www.grantadesign.com/products/mi/

Supporting images: www.grantadesign.com/news/media.htm