EAST MOLINE, IL, May 9, 2007 - 4CS, the leading provider of intelligent warranty management software, today announced that the Forestry Division of Blount, Inc. successfully deployed 4CS iWarranty software in early 2007, enabling Blount to proactively manage warranty across the entire service chain. iWarranty allows Blount to increase the speed and accuracy of all warranty claim information from claim entry, processing and payment to parts return, supplier recovery and product improvement. This will significantly increase the manufacturer's productivity and support a key business objective to reduce warranty claim rates and warranty as a percentage of sales.

Richard A. Planisek, Blount Forestry Division Vice President Product Support, describes the company's positive experience with the 4CS implementation. “The iWarranty implementation went smoother than any project of this scale that I have been involved in during my 18 year career. Collaboratively, both our team and the 4CS team did an outstanding job. 4CS demonstrated professionalism and excellent project management skills. They had a good plan, met timelines and showed a good understanding of warranty and our service network.”

Rich continues, “Their dedicated-team approach also helped during the deployment phase to our dealers. They were very helpful in developing user manuals enabling us to have multiple webex's with our dealers, which led to a smooth and seamless deployment. I believe they have a good template and process for future implementations and customers. iWarranty is truly an out of the box system; however, the 4CS team listened to our needs and was very open to making modifications so that it would fit our specific needs. We are very pleased and satisfied.”

Craig Harper, Blount 6 Sigma Project Manager, noted, “Our dealers were very pleased – a dramatic improvement that enables our dealers to manage their own warranty business much better. During one of our early dealer webex training sessions, one of the dealer participants asked if this was the same warranty system as another OEM – when advised it was, she noted training would not even be needed as it was intuitive. Our dealers like the campaign templates, quicker payment, and the visibility it gives them to claim status.”

Rich went on to say, “One of the major benefits we are realizing from iWarranty is that it is giving us more detailed failure reports which we provide to our engineers to help them determine root cause, ultimately improving product quality. It is helping us close the loop on quality issues, and we have now started identifying failures by causal part; our failure descriptions have improved during the claim submittal process.”

iWarranty intelligent software dramatically improves process efficiency by reducing the average cycle times for claims processing and gives the service network visibility to status. Rich also shared, “The iWarranty automatic-settle feature is already validating and processing a significant percentage of our claims and reducing processing steps. This has resulted in the reallocation of one resource in our department to more value added functions. It was also a business strategy to reduce to a 30 day deadline for both claim submittal and claim payment. The system has helped us implement these business changes in a seamless manner. In addition, in the past, we and our dealers did not provide visibility to pending claims. We are taking advantage of iWarranty's intuitive work queue feature that provides users with instant notification of work required and status of claims submitted.”

Rich described how warranty is tied to their company's key business objectives. “Blount Forestry Division has defined a set of mission critical project charters. One of the charters in 2007 is to reduce claims-per-unit and warranty as a percent-of-sales. Our warranty charter team is a collaboration of plant managers, continuous improvement engineers and warranty and product specialists. These professionals have all been trained to successfully leverage our iWarranty tool to accomplish our key business objectives. We rely on iWarranty to help us analyze critical warranty information and we are using it to track progress towards goals and determine the measurement of success. Even at this early stage, we are seeing warranty costs trend downward.” Rich has been asked by the Association of Equipment Manufacturers to speak on this topic at their Customer Support Council Seminar October 7-10, 2007 in San Antonio, Texas.

Jim Cox, Blount VP Engineering, shared, “Our engineers are finding iWarranty to be very effective in providing good object (causal part identification) and defect (reasons for failure). iWarranty has eliminated the necessity of Product Support translating the warranty data prior to submission to Engineering; our engineers like the fact that we get failure information direct from the dealer technician without summarization being done by Blount Product Support. They love the many ways they can now sort claim data and the ability to instantly look at claim detail.”

Blount IT Manager, Brenda Woods, noted, “I have been in this business for 30 years and I wish all conversions went this well. The architecture made it easy to use. 4CS IT professionals were courteous, helpful and responsive. They provided us very clear and complete specifications with the detail that we needed to efficiently convert the claim data.”

iWarranty also allows Blount, Inc. to choose from different modules giving them the ability to deploy those that will add the most value first. Rich said, “We intend to utilize the iWarranty Supplier Recovery module to collaborate with our suppliers to improve quality and reduce our overall supplier warranty.”

Gene Weber , 4CS Senior Warranty Consultant, noted, “Blount personnel knew what they wanted from a warranty system and noted up front that they intended to leverage iWarranty to the hilt to improve their business. Their Project Management team worked hard to stay ahead of ours and vice versa leading to a successful deployment. It is a pleasure to work with such success-driven teams!”

About Blount International

Blount International, Inc. is a diversified international company operating in two principal business segments: Outdoor Products and Industrial and Power Equipment . Blount sells its products in more than 100 countries around the world.

About 4CS

4CS is a leading provider of intelligent warranty software solutions. 4CS iWarranty software significantly reduces warranty costs by improving product quality and reliability, cost and information-sharing with suppliers and partners, and by optimizing the entire warranty cycle through integration and automation.

iWarranty intelligent software directly connects manufacturers, suppliers, dealers, partners and customers in a service network. It provides a comprehensive, process-driven solution for managing warranty by integrating the following modules: e-Claims, Parts Return, Supplier Warranty, Purchased Warranty, Warranty Analytics, and Warranty Center.

For more information, www.4CS.com or call 800.709.8773