Press Room

Wednesday, September 21, 2005 — 3E Company®, the leading provider of chemical, regulatory and compliance information services, announced today the September 30 availability of Version 2.0 of its 3E Online® service delivery platform. The first application available on the new platform is the company's flagship MSDS (Material Safety Data Sheet) management program, 3E Online-MSDS Version 5.0, which has also been enhanced with additional features and functionality.

3E Online v2.0 – The Platform
The new platform was built on an architecture that will enable it to serve as an EH&S (Environmental Health & Safety) information portal, housing all online applications in a central environment. Additional applications will also be accessible through this portal, such as Transportation Classification, Regulatory Reporting, Training and more. The company also plans to integrate online applications from its Ariel™ manufacturer services product line, such as Ariel WebInsight, which joined the 3E product portfolio following the acquisition of Ariel Research Corporation in late 2004. 3E is the first company to bring to market such a broad range of online-accessible services spanning the entire chemical lifecycle.

3E Online-MSDS v5.0 – The Service
The new release of 3E Online-MSDS boasts an easy-to-use inventory-building tool, expanded search capabilities, significant navigational enhancements and a newly re-designed graphical user interface. The application now provides the ability to search inventories across multiple facilities in one search, as well as additional search options, such as by MSDS manufacturer name. Users even have the option to specify their own search criteria on a set number of custom value fields. Step-by-step help instructions are provided throughout the system to make the user experience easy and efficient.

The new version also features a Product Catalog, which significantly improves the way a customer manages its MSDS inventories at the corporate level. The application provides a superior method for identifying duplicate products so that companies with common products across multiple locations can now enjoy vastly improved data consistency.

As the first step in 3E's integration of Ariel products into the 3E Online platform, the EHS Lists accessed within 3E Online-MSDS are powered by Ariel regulatory content, which is maintained by the Ariel Global Research Team and considered one of the most trusted sources of chemical regulatory information commercially available today.

3E Online-MSDS's Classification & Label modules have also been improved, and are easily accessible from anywhere in the site. The classification information has also been simplified for easier identification of relevant data.

"The release of our new online platform and enhanced MSDS management system follows our market-driven product development strategy, for which we require extensive feedback from our customers, who are looking forward to increasingly sophisticated technology to help them do their jobs more effectively and efficiently," said Robert S. Christie, CEO and president of 3E Company. "We are strongly committed to meeting that demand through innovation and aggressive product development with an eye towards turning complex and tedious tasks into streamlined, simple and efficient processes."

"We view this as a major upgrade, packed full of tremendous improvements for the EH&S professional," said Don Cleveland, Director of Industrial Hygiene at BNSF Railway. "We definitely recognize 3E's determination and commitment for staying on the leading edge of compliance management, which aligns us well with our own plans for modernizing compliance processes and their underlying technologies."

Pricing and Availability
Pricing for new customers includes set-up charges, an on-going annual program fee and a per- product fee based on the number of chemical products managed. Current customers' data will require migration onto the new architecture. Current customers will be notified individually regarding migration schedules, plans and employee training.

About 3E Company
3E Company is the first company to provide a comprehensive suite of services for environmental, health and safety (EH&S) related chemical and hazardous materials information and compliance management that addresses the entire chemical lifecycle. This suite of services includes regulatory research; MSDS authoring, distribution and management; transportation; emergency response; training; regulatory reporting; and hazardous waste management. 3E has the industry leading combination of a 24-7-365 hazmat mission control call center, with an online platform for hazmat compliance information management, all built on a foundation of the world's premier hazardous substance database of global regulatory and compliance information. Its international, multi-lingual professional staff is composed of regulatory specialists, experienced product stewards, industrial hygienists, attorneys, chemists and chemical engineers, MSDS experts and EH&S systems consultants.

3E's services offer a cost effective program for regulatory compliance management by alleviating the pain, managing risk, increasing the efficiency and enhancing staff productivity, enabling EH&S professionals to focus on more strategic functions. Today more than 7,000 customers have partnered with 3E including AT&T, Costco Wholesale Corporation, America West, Eastman Chemical, Temple-Inland, L.L. Bean, Menasha, PacifiCorp and Truserv. 3E was founded in 1988 and is the recipient of the 2002, 2003 and 2005 Commitment to Worker Safety Award in Online and MSDS Services from Compliance Magazine. The privately held company is headquartered in Carlsbad, CA with additional operations in Bethesda, Md., Kingsport, Tenn., and Copenhagen, Denmark. For more information on 3E Company, visit www.3ecompany.com, send e-mail to info@3ecompany.com or call 800-360-3220.