Ottawa, July 11, 2000—Cognos^® (Nasdaq:COGN; TSE:CSN), the world’s largest and most successful business intelligence company, announced today that Lafarge Corporation (NYSE & TSE: LAF), North America’s largest diversified supplier of construction material products, has selected the Cognos business intelligence solution as a key component of its e-business infrastructure within its cement division.

Lafarge will foster knowledge-sharing and collaboration by providing employees and business partners with the ability to access, analyze and report on in-depth, real-time information from their desktops with Cognos’ Web-based solution. Lafarge will benefit from a unified view of global business activities, and be able to accelerate decision-making, streamline processes and strengthen e-business relationships.

Cognos’ electronic, interactive business analysis and reporting solution will replace Lafarge’s static, paper-bound reporting system to improve the quality and speed of decision-making. It is planned that, by the end of 2000 the Cognos’ solution will be deployed throughout the Cement organization in North America.

"Lafarge is positioning itself as an e-business leader in the construction materials industry. Cognos is perfectly aligned with our e-business initiative to leverage information assets and create synergies across the organization and supply chain," said Marc Cardinal, Lafarge’s IT director of systems development and support for the Cement Division. "Cognos provides an end-to-end solution that empowers business users to perform in-depth analysis and reporting with the simplicity of a Web browser. Cognos enables Lafarge to use the dissemination capabilities of the Web to drive faster, more confident decisions by our employees and business partners."

The DecisionStream® component of Cognos’ solution played a major factor in Lafarge’s decision. Lafarge consolidates and analyzes information residing in different systems spread across multiple North American locations using a data warehouse and a set of subject-oriented data marts. DecisionStream ensures the information originating from various repositories is coordinated and structured according to the subject dimensions specified by the business user, regardless of the data source.

"Lafarge and other ’traditional’ companies evolving into e-businesses are using Cognos’ Web-based technology to connect their employees, customers and suppliers to the organization through an open, coordinated information source," said Joanne K. Masingill, Cognos senior vice president of marketing. "Information is not only the ’currency of the New Economy,’ it’s also the foundation of interpersonal relationships in the e-business age. Cognos facilitates information-based relationships by transforming data into collaborative intelligence."

Lafarge
Lafarge Corporation is North America’s largest diversified supplier of cement, concrete, aggregate and other basic materials for residential, commercial, institutional and public works construction. The company operates 15 cement plants, more than 700 construction materials operations, three drywall manufacturing facilities and other businesses in 44 states in the U.S. and all provinces of Canada. The company’s majority shareholder is Lafarge S.A. of Paris, France. The Lafarge Group is the world leader in construction materials with operations in 70 countries and 1999 sales of more than $11 billion.