BURLINGTON, MA, April 18, 2001—Cognos^® (NASDAQ:COGN ; TSE:CSN), the world's largest and most successful business intelligence company, today announced that the Davey Tree Expert Company, North America's first tree care company, has selected a Cognos enterprise business intelligence solution to help overcome a backlog of reporting and analysis requests and reduce the strain on its limited IT resources. Cognos will also play a strategic role in propelling Davey Tree's transition to Web-based business processes and in preparing the company for future e-commerce initiatives.

Employee-owned Davey Tree provides tree, shrub and lawn care, grounds maintenance, consulting services, and vegetation management across Canada and the United States. Using Cognos' OLAP reporting solution, employees in Corporate, Finance, Sales and Marketing, Safety, and Consulting Services will be able to access aggregated business data from SAP's Sales and Distribution, Procurement, Human Resources and Payroll, Plant Maintenance, and Service Management modules.

Employees can then generate detailed reports and uncover unique insights in internal and customer data, analyze market share of services offered, track key performance indicators, monitor profitability of services offered, and perform budgeting and financial forecasting. Cognos' high-impact visualization and scorecarding capabilities will deliver information quickly and intuitively, making the reports easily understandable to all employees, regardless of technical expertise. Davey Tree will also be able to track finances and perform complex budgeting across their 85 locations in North America.

"We anticipate Cognos to be a highly strategic part of our business, putting real-time, actionable information into the hands of our employees through the simplicity of a Web browser," said Pat Covey, Manager, Systems and Process Management Group, Davey Tree Expert Company. "Cognos will allow us to embrace e-business, streamline business processes, and gain critical insight into the factors driving our business."

In the future, Davey Tree customers will be able to access Cognos reports containing information and analysis about their services, book appointments, and view billing information via a secure Extranet.

Davey Tree selected Cognos for the breadth and depth of the solution, it's powerful OLAP capabilities, ease of use, and zero-footprint HTML architecture, which is ideal for large-scale e-business deployments. "Previously, we were generating reports that were static and not customizable to the end user. Employees from senior executives to sales office administrators are now able to access and share interactive reports via the Cognos Upfront portal and perform multidimensional analysis with little to no assistance from IT," said Thom Mumaw, Business Analyst, Davey Tree Expert Company.

"By deploying Cognos business intelligence solutions, traditional service companies like the Davey Tree Expert Company are able to harness the power of the Web to analyze and extract critical insights from their customer and internal data," said Ben Plummer, vice president of marketing, Cognos. "This information can then be leveraged across the enterprise to optimize business processes, improve customer acquisition and retention, and strengthen the supply chain."

The Davey Tree Expert Company
The Davey Tree Expert Company provides tree, shrub and lawn care, grounds management, vegetation management and consulting services throughout the United States and Canada. Davey is employee-owned with nearly 6,000 employees. For more information, visit the Web site at http://www.davey.com.