Roche Diagnostics' North America Information Technology (IT) Team Achieves Special SAP Certification

One of only 25 Companies in all of the Americas to Receive the Certification

Roche Diagnostics' North America Information Technology (IT) team has received the SAP® Customer Competency Center (CCC) Certification. Roche Diagnostics is only the 25th company in all of the Americas (North, South, and Latin America) to receive this certification.

In an effort to continually improve the services being provided by Roche Diagnostics' IT team, SAP, the world's leading provider of business software solutions, conducted a SAP Operations Competency Assessment to evaluate Roche Diagnostics' IT processes against what they consider to be their best practices. Roche Diagnostics' received some of the highest possible scores in the various categories assessed.

The SAP assessment consisted of three days of focused interviews with both IT team members and business partners. The interviews and assessment covered the following areas:

• Service Level Management - Support organization roles and responsibilities, support strategy, service level management, escalation management, training management, and management of customer satisfaction.
  
  
• Support Desk Management - Message handling of incidents or problems, message analyzing recording and tracking, monitoring and reporting, tool support, and daily operations management.
  
  
• SAP Technology Management - System administration, back-up and recovery, network management, security, capacity planning, and performance management.
  
  
• Business Process Management - Business process analysis and communication, business process monitoring, program scheduling management, data management and archiving, master data maintenance and exchange, and integration and interface management.
  
  
• Software Change Management - Release and upgrade management, support package and SAP note implementation, transport management, quality and test management, development request and release management, and technology migration management.

"This is a great honor to be recognized by SAP as having a Customer Competency Center and a great achievement for the Roche Diagnostics' North America IT team. They have implemented and practiced what SAP considers to be best practices for management of an SAP environment," said Tom Kegley, V.P. of Information Technology North America at Roche Diagnostics.

Roche Diagnostics will now receive additional special offerings which are only available to certified CCC's. These include offerings such as early knowledge transfer for new SAP products, discounts on certain SAP training courses, and special handling for problem messages sent to SAP.

About Roche and the Roche Diagnostics Division
Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, Roche is one of the world's leading research-focused healthcare groups in the fields of pharmaceuticals and diagnostics. As a supplier of innovative products and services for the early detection, prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease, the Group contributes on a broad range of fronts to improving people's health and quality of life. Roche is a world leader in diagnostics, the leading supplier of medicines for cancer and transplantation and a market leader in virology. In 2004, sales by the Pharmaceuticals Division totaled 21.7 billion Swiss francs, while the Diagnostics Division posted sales of 7.8 billion Swiss francs. Roche employs roughly 65,000 people in 150 countries and has R&D agreements and strategic alliances with numerous partners, including majority ownership interests in Genentech and Chugai. Roche's Diagnostics Division offers a uniquely broad product portfolio and supplies a wide array of innovative testing products and services to researchers, physicians, patients, hospitals and laboratories world-wide. Roche Diagnostics' North American headquarters is located in Indianapolis, Ind. (www.roche-diagnostics.us) For further information, please visit our websites www.roche.us and www.roche-diagnostics.com.

For additional information contact:

Doyia Turner
Roche Diagnostics
Tel.: +1-317-521-7252
e-mail: doyia.turner@roche.com
www.roche-diagnostics.us