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Letter to the Editor

BodyShopMall.com eBusiness Site Hits 10,000 Order Milestone Ahead of Schedule

SOUTHFIELD, Mich. -- bodyshopmall.com, one of the BASF Automotive Refinish "eBusiness Toolbox" websites, has recorded its 10,000th customer order sooner than expected. Launched in 2000, bodyshopmall.com is a web-based shop management tool which features online ordering of paint and associated supplies and is available to customers of the Automotive Refinish Technologies (A.R.T.) jobber chain.

"Both the volume of orders, and the rapid acceptance of this new technology by our collision repair facilities, have frankly exceeded our initial projections," said Albert Winterman, Group Vice President, BASF Automotive Refinish. "The degree to which our web-based tools and systems are being embraced by our customers further validates the current thinking that our industry is moving inevitably and quickly toward not only online product procurement, but web-based daily shop management as well," Winterman observed.

Bodyshopmall was piloted in A.R.T. markets including Memphis, Huntsville, Little Rock, and Winnipeg in March 2000, and subsequently went "live online" for A.R.T. markets across the U.S. and Canada beginning in the fall of last year. The site will soon be introduced in the Austin, TX and Hawaii markets, completing its A.R.T. implementation.

The very first of the 10,000 orders was placed by Regal Auto Plaza Collision Center in Hunstville, AL, in the spring of 2000. Regal's Dave Graf said that Bodyshopmall has exceeded his expectations. "It's been even easier than I thought it would be," Graf reported. "A.R.T. made sure we didn't have any problems. Whenever we've had questions, they've been right there. But we really haven't needed any help with it for quite a while now."

Regal Collision uses Bodyshopmall to place a monthly order. "You're going to buy all that material anyway, so it's easier to just do it as one big order per month," Graf explained. In terms of profitability improvement, Graf noted that "ordering everything through Bodyshopmall with A.R.T. has helped us to achieve the paint and materials margins we need to reach."

In addition to its online PBE product ordering functions, Bodyshopmall offers a wide range of essential shop management information and services. These features include global color information, a complete library of product technical and regulatory data, schedules and enrollment instructions for BASF Training, industry links, and more, all available to the shop owner 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Further, using Bodyshopmall will enable shop customers to be among the first to enroll with VisionPLUS® OnLine (launching in September of this year), the only web-based business analysis and profitability management toolset of its kind in the collision repair industry.

"bodyshopmall.com is about taking control of your business," explained Guy Bargnes, BASF Automotive Refinish Director of Marketing, "and online ordering is just one facet of that. It also gives shops the ability to increase paint and materials gross profit, reduce inventory costs, and reduce cycle times by making it much easier for shop personnel to access the information they need quickly."

The industry's first transactional eCommerce site, bodyshopmall.com helped BASF establish an eBusiness leadership position in the collision repair arena. BASF is continuing to add new web-based products to its "eBusiness Toolbox," which currently includes the web-enabled SmartTrak®2 color management system, the VisionPLUS OnLine web-based business analysis toolset, and bodyshopmall.com.

"Our plan is to extend a host of eBusiness capabilities throughout our distribution network," Bargnes noted, "and our next offering will be ColorSourceMall.com, for our ColorSource® member jobbers. Later this year, we will further extend this advantage to our independent multi-line jobbers with an offering called PBEMall.com," he said.

BASF Corporation and its subsidiaries ranks as the third largest producer of chemicals and related products in the United States, Canada and Mexico, with sales of $7.9 billion in 2000. Based in Mount Olive, NJ, BASF Corporation is the North American affiliate of BASF Aktiengesellschaft (Ludwigshafen, Germany), which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the trading symbol "BF."

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