(Oakland, CA June 7, 2004) — Oakland, CA-based BARONdirect announced the addition of a new utility, SMARTvision, to its SMARTsuite (Spend Management Awareness Real-Time) set of online spend management tools. SMARTvision allows clients who have placed an order with BARONdirect and who have been set up on the SMARTsuite system to go online and track where jobs are in the production cycle. According to BARONdirect's president and CEO, Henry F. Scarpelli, the new functionality enables legal administrators, marketers, and purchasing professionals to better monitor and regulate work-in-process printing expenditures. "We developed SMARTvision to allow clients to see where their jobs are in the production cycle," says Scarpelli. "In our next system release clients will be able to actually stop a job during production for last minute changes. The charge for the stop order will even be automatically calculated." BARONdirect was the industry’s first platform-independent e-commerce system for ordering printed and engraved stationery products, marketing materials, specialty products, and business supplies. Today, it serves national and multinational law firms, medical establishments, and corporations. BARONdirect's Phoenix, AZ, plant also produces specialty diecut presentation folders, packaging, binders, and custom filing products, in addition to highend color printing. Its fully integrated production facilities also produce documents in Braille. BARONdirect's SMARTsuite (Spend Management Awareness Real-Time) solution is a set of integrated Web-based tools that allow tighter budget controls and greater budgeting accuracy. In addition to the new tracking function, SMARTsuite provides real-time information regarding open and invoiced orders, transaction history, purchasing summary and product list. Developed for small businesses and large global enterprises, SMARTsuite is available to all customers and is easy and inexpensive to implement, involves little training, and does not disrupt existing technologies. "We can set clients up on the system in a matter of hours," says Olga Kazakova, BARONdirect's vice president of marketing. "Clients like it so much they're asking us to invite their other vendors onto our platform to enable them to have the same business intelligence regarding transactions with those vendors."