New Release Drives Reductions in Spend, Improved Compliance and Automated Procurement Processes for Mission Critical Services Including Asset Maintenance and Contingent Labor.

Sunnyvale, CA – June 1, 2004 — Elance, Inc., the world's leading provider of solutions for buying and managing services, today announced the worldwide availability of a new release, Elance Services Procurement and Management (SPM) 4.5™. Elance SPM 4.5 adds numerous enhancements to the suite's existing ability to automate and streamline the end-to-end process of buying and managing a wide range of services. New features in Elance SPM 4.5 help companies better procure and manage services specific to the energy, utility and chemical sectors, including contracted services for the development and maintenance of mission critical assets such as processing plants, power generation plants, pipelines and distribution networks.

Developed in close collaboration with energy and utility customers and leveraging Elance's proven domain and technology expertise, new features in Elance SPM 4.5 help these companies drive reductions in spend, increase use of preferred suppliers, ensure that services are purchased in accordance with corporate guidelines, monitor supplier performance and streamline processes. These capabilities provide customers with unprecedented visibility into where services are being purchased, the number of contingent workers on site or in the field, the quality of the services delivered and the cost of these services across the company and across initiatives.

Energy and utility companies are unique in their sophisticated use of a wide variety of services ranging from manual labor performing plant maintenance to economists, biologists, chemists and physicists performing environmental research and energy resource analysis. Power providers, for example, have multi-million dollar assets such as power generation facilities and electric distribution networks that require scheduled, unscheduled and emergency maintenance-all of which necessitate mobilizing teams of external resources in compressed timeframes, against defined specifications and service levels, at the lowest possible cost. Often this work is performed by contracted labor with pay rates tied to rules around overtime, double overtime, location and expertise required to perform work. Pay rates are also tied to units of service such as miles of vegetation cleared from pipeline or power line. Energy companies' service initiatives also must comply with applicable labor laws and, in some cases, Union requirements.

"As the largest public power provider in the US, TVA leverages external service providers extensively in such areas as IT, engineering, administration, grounds keeping, facilities maintenance and construction," said Paul LaPointe, Senior Vice President of Procurement at TVA. "TVA has adopted best practice processes for procuring and managing services to drive efficiency and further reduce the delivered cost of power. We are looking to Elance to help us manage our complex requirements and deliver our business objectives."

"Proactive management of the purchase and delivery of services is essential to world-class process. Elance is unique in its ability to handle a wide variety of outsourced services," said Farley Blackman, Vice President and General Manager of Global Sourcing & Quality for BP. "This breadth of capability enables increased supplier performance, management and quality-all while delivering cost savings."

"Our customers rely on our technology to better buy and manage an increasingly strategic portfolio of outsourced services. In the energy business these services are critical to maximizing asset utilization," said Fabio Rosati, president and CEO of Elance. "Elance SPM 4.5 provides dramatic benefits to our customers in a wide range of asset intensive industries, including the energy and utility sector, by improving the management of service providers. These improvements in turn directly impact the speed, efficiency and cost at which energy products are delivered to market."

Energy and utility industry-specific capabilities: Elance SPM 4.5 includes numerous features that allow customers to manage sophisticated asset maintenance services, model complex services contracts and pay rates, and implement detailed process and approval workflows. As a result, energy and utility companies can better track and manage services to ensure uptime of critical assets, increase the quality services delivered and lower the cost of these services.

• Support For All Services - Many of the services purchased by energy and utility companies are unique to the industry. As a result, support for a wide range of services contracts is critical for providing visibility and control of external services expenditures. Support for these contracts includes modeling payments based on time and expenses, consulting or fixed deliverables, or units of work performed. Examples of energy and utility industry services supported include vegetation management services for clearing power lines, turbine pump maintenance for dams and reservoirs, and pipeline maintenance services for oil and gas companies.
  
  
• Asset Maintenance Services - Energy companies can secure and manage large numbers of contingent workers on a single order enabling them to optimize maintenance of costly assets such as fossil fuel and nuclear generation facilities to ensure minimal downtime. Service costs can be accurately tracked and allocated back to the serviced asset in order to depreciate capital expenses.
  
  
• External Workforce Management - In today's fiscally conservative and risk averse environment, it is critical to understand who has access at every facility. This includes contractors, consultants, supplier service providers and all other non-employee personnel onsite. Elance provides a central repository to manage, track and provide facility access for all external workers. Elance fully automates the on-boarding process for these workers to ensure background checks are performed, equipment is provided and tracked, and badge and plant security systems know exactly when and where external workers should have access. As a result, management can see, with the push of a button, exactly how many and which external workers have access at every location.
  
  
• Flexible Process and Approval Workflows - Best practices in services procurement include competitive bidding for all service requests and use of preferred suppliers with preferred pricing. Enforcing these best practices while also handling exceptions is critical for the adoption of these processes. Elance allows users to work with one or more suppliers in several modes and then enforces one of several different management and financial approval workflows depending on the costs of the services and how the service was ordered. This flexibility allows trusted suppliers advanced system access enabling them to be more responsive during emergency situations.
  
  
• Complex Pay Rate Structures and Formulas - Contingent labor pay rates in the energy industry can be very complex due to federal regulations, industry requirements and union contracts. Elance SPM 4.5 includes several new pay rate features, including tenure-based discounts, flexible workweek definitions, and temporary agency markup formulas. Regardless of the complexity of the pay rate or supplier markup, Elance ensures competitive pricing on all service orders by enforcing the rates already established in the master agreement.
  
  
• Integration with Indus Passport - Indus Passport is a leader in customer, asset and workforce management software products, for the energy industry. Elance's powerful integration capabilities enable tight integration with Passport, allowing energy companies to synchronize supplier and master contract data across systems, manage purchase orders, generate invoices, track costs and budgets across initiatives and annual project plans.

About TVA
TVA is the nation's largest public power provider and is completely self-financed. TVA provides power to large industries and 158 power distributors that serve approximately 8.5 million consumers in seven southeastern states.

About Elance, Inc.
Elance is the leading provider of software solutions for Services Procurement and Management (SPM) that improve the way organizations buy and manage services - one of the largest components of corporate spending. With the Elance SPM 4.5TM application suite, large organizations can gain visibility into services spend and performance, establish and control enterprise processes, and achieve 10-20% hard cost savings across a broad range of external service categories. Elance also provides the Elance OnlineTM services marketplace, the leading Web-based project marketplace that connects small- and medium-sized businesses with a global pool of high-quality service providers. For more information on Elance, please call 650-316-7500 or visit www.elance.com.

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