February 4, 2005

AssurX Announces Immediate Availability of CATSWeb Records Management for Effective Compliance with Corporate Record Retention Policies

-- Reduces risk by assuring that corporate record retention policies are automatically enforced
-- Facilitates compliance with regulatory standards such as FDA predicate rules, Sarbanes-Oxley, ISO 15489, DoD 5015.2, NARA laws and statutes, HIPAA and many more.

MORGAN HILL CA USA (February 4, 2005) – AssurX, Inc., the leader in Enterprise Quality and Compliance Systems, today announced the immediate availability of CATSWeb Records Management, allowing easy and effective compliance with corporate record retention policies. With recent high profile corporate compliance scandals being thrust into the spotlight, records management – the practice of maintaining records for the proper amount of time until they are destroyed or archived according to corporate policy – has become a critical issue with new and updated industry and government regulations. CATSWeb Records Management is designed to address key business requirements for electronic recordkeeping and compliance, while allowing a quick return on investment, compliance enforcement and lower exposure to risk.

CATSWeb Records Management allows easy and effective compliance with corporate record retention policies by automating the process of archiving or purging records and documents that meet configurable criteria. Key benefits include:

• Reduces risk by assuring that corporate record retention policies are consistently and automatically enforced.
  
• Facilitates compliance with regulatory requirements and standards related to records management (ISO 15489, DoD 5015.2, NARA laws and statutes, FDA predicate rules, Sarbanes-Oxley Act, HIPAA, etc.).
  
• Improves productivity and effectiveness of administrative staff by eliminating what was previously a tedious, labor-intensive, error prone process.
  
• Minimizes legal liabilities by ensuring that records are kept for only as long as they are useful and needed, consistent with corporate policies.
  
• Eases location and retrieval of archived records via integration with CATSWeb’s record-level audit trail and built-in query and search engines.
  

According to Rick Smith, Quality Assurance Engineering Manager at Alcon Labs, “The biggest advantage of having built-in records management is that it’s safe, and this is very important to our organization. On the one hand you have the strict FDA compliance requirements of audit trails, but on the other hand, you have corporate retention policies, so it’s very important to have consistency. At the end of the corporate retention policy, it’s key to be able to purge these records.”

Paul Fricke, Senior Quality Scientist – Compliance QA, from Access Business Group concurs, “The new records management feature is very important to our organization. We use CATSWeb for internal and external audit information among other workflow processes. Once an audit process is completed and records have reached a certain age, our record retention policy requires those records to be discarded. Without this ability in CATSWeb, records would be retained past their business use and not in alignment with our corporate policy. This takes up valuable database space and creates unnecessary exceptions to policy.”

CATSWeb Records Management includes effective security controls, ensuring that policy-based record archiving and purging is performed in a safe, controlled manner. For example, two different individuals can be required to independently review and approve record management jobs before processing is allowed to occur. Configurable transaction logging is built-in, easing process audits and system validation.

To learn more about CATSWeb Records Management, or to arrange a live online demo, please call 408-778-1376, ext. 705.

About AssurX, Inc.
AssurX, Inc. provides companies with best-of-breed enterprise-wide global solutions for their quality system needs. CATSWeb is the proven leader as the industry's quality system of choice -- used at FDA-regulated and ISO/QS 9000 certified companies around the world. CATSWeb is a zero client application that can be accessed from any computer, running any operating system, with any Web browser, anywhere and anytime that an Internet or intranet connection is available. AssurX is headquartered in Morgan Hill, CA with satellite offices throughout North America. More information about CATSWeb and AssurX can be found at www.assurx.com.