SNCF Fret uses ILOG JRules to Create a Flexible Pricing System

New System Reduced Billing Costs by 20 Percent

PARIS – April 4, 2006 – ILOG® (NASDAQ : ILOG; Euronext : ILO, ISIN : FR0004042364), today announced that SNCF Fret, the freight subsidiary of SNCF France’s National Railway, is using ILOG JRules™ to create a new pricing system as part of a significant IT modernization effort. With the adoption of ILOG JRules, a key offering in ILOG’s Business Rules Management System product line (BRMS), SNCF Fret has automated and streamlined pricing policies for its domestic and international traffic management business, which represents €1.82 billion ($2.2 billion) of SNCF’s annual revenue, reducing billing processing costs by 20 percent.

Transporting goods by rail is characterized by many variables that impact pricing strategies, including seasonality, type of freight cars, geography, types of goods, lead times, etc. Adding to the complexity, the sales force had to adapt their pricing proposals to the unique contract requirements of SNCF Fret’s 13,000 clients. However, in SNCF’s old IT system, changing pricing policies was time consuming and difficult since pricing tariffs were stored in mainframes that were more than 15 years old and were managed manually using Excel-like tables, which created a high potential for error.

Using ILOG JRules, SNCF Fret has established accurate pricing by centralizing tens of thousands of pricing rules. Sales people can now make easily more detailed sales proposals based upon variables specific to their clients. Moreover, the flexibility provided by the BRMS allows for simple and fast rule changes. New pricing policies and special offers can be introduced easily, ensuring that SNCF Fret remains competitive, while increasing sales revenues and profitability. Business users can also write and manage their rules in the natural language of their business, and keep them in an easy to maintain centralized repository.

SNCF Fret is using ILOG JRules to perform three key functions:

• automate and simplify the pricing process and the management of pricing policies, from the definition of pricing offers by marketing, to sales negotiations, to order processing and billing,
• provide sales people with a tool that enables them to directly control and modify pricing complexity using simulations as well as control over negotiating margins, and
• deliver consistent and transparent billing.

“This strategic project was characterized by a swift return on investment and provides us with the means to adapt to our environment and to our market, and to remain competitive by creating a climate of trust with our clients,” said Idriss Elasri, client back office program manager for SNCF Fret. “The business rules technology, deployed in just six months, enabled us to deploy an application that provides us with better agility and transparency. In IT terms, we now have a high-performance, scalable and easy to maintain system, which simultaneously meets the needs of internal and external clients.”

ILOG has consistently built on its history of product innovation to make ILOG JRules the industry’s leading business rule software. Recently, Gartner Dataquest ranked ILOG the market share leader of the worldwide business rule engine software market for 2004, and Gartner positioned ILOG in the leader quadrant of Gartner’s 2005 Magic Quadrant for Business Rule Engines. The company has also been twice-named the BRMS market leader by IT research firm IDC. Customers of the award-winning ILOG JRules include eBay, Equifax, Grupo Santander, Harrah’s Entertainment, Visa, Vodafone, Zurich, and many other leading Global 2000 companies and governments worldwide.

About ILOG
ILOG delivers software and services that empower customers to make better decisions faster and manage change and complexity. Over 2,500 global corporations and more than 465 leading software vendors rely on ILOG's market-leading business rule management system (BRMS), optimization and visualization software components, to achieve dramatic returns on investment, create market-defining products and services, and sharpen their competitive edge. ILOG was founded in 1987 and employs more than 700 people worldwide. For more information, please visit www.ilog.com .

ILOG is a registered trademark, and ILOG JRules is a trademark of ILOG. All other trademarks are the properties of their respective owners.