BURLINGTON, MA, March 17, 2004,—Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in enterprise business intelligence (EBI) and corporate performance management, today announced the leading supply chain management firm, UTi Worldwide in South Africa, has selected Cognos as its enterprise standard. Choosing Cognos over a number of competitive solutions, UTi Worldwide has purchased Cognos Enterprise Business Intelligence Series scorecarding, dashboarding, analysis and data integration as well as Cognos ReportNet for monitoring its supply chain performance.

With a substantial global client base, UTi Worldwide was looking for a business intelligence solution that could provide the scalability, ease of use and multilingual support they required to address the needs of its growing business. Selecting Cognos ReportNet and the full breadth of the Cognos EBI Series, UTi will use Cognos to standardize and consolidate all enterprise reporting requirements on a single solution.

"Cognos offers us a solution that will create a true self-serve Web-based reporting environment for our business decision-makers as well as an easy-to-administer scorecarding solution. Time to decision is a key issue in our business where speed counts," said Walter Mapham, director of strategic services, UTi. "Under our old system, reporting was inflexible and labor intensive. With Cognos ReportNet we expect to be able to create complex business reports and identify management action in a matter of minutes, putting critical information in the hands of users, driving competitive advantage.

With ReportNet capable of producing publishable documents immediately, management actions for rectifying any problem areas will be easier to identify and the progress of any such actions tracked by using the snapshot facility. This feature allows for a time period comparison of the business on the whole with full drill-down capabilities.

Traditional ERP systems are primarily transactional, and fulfill the needs of the operational level of the organization. Taking the data gathered in these systems to the strategic level of the business requires the elimination of "wallpaper reporting." Instead of masses of data an interactive and flexible drill down process allows the user to extract pertinent information which is what management want and need.

"Cognos Metrics Manager will give users immediate insights on supply chain performance. Driving performance scorecards to key stakeholders across the organizations as well as an collaborative environment to solve business issue will deliver dramatic time to market advantage for our users," added Mapham. "Another key benefit of using the Cognos EBI Series is the ability to integrate data sources using the ETL tool, DecisionStream. This is incredibly useful as it extracts data from a variety of sources, including eMpower and any ERP system, for presentation in a unified, tactical view."

Cognos ReportNet is a fully Unicode product capable of querying data in many languages. Designed to scale to 100s of 1,000s of users, Cognos ReportNet solution draws upon Cognos reporting and query leadership, delivering a revolution in reporting. Cognos ReportNet is fully integrated within the Cognos Enterprise BI Series solution, including flexible scorecards, dashboards, powerful industry-leading OLAP analysis, event detection and alerting, and data integration.

The usage of the new solution is being driven from South Africa, with major customers already prototyping it for the last 6 months. Once this phase, involving clients from a number of vertical industry segments including automotive manufacturing and pharmaceuticals, the offering will be brought to the global market.

About UTi Worldwide
UTi Worldwide Inc. is an international, non-asset based supply chain management company providing air and ocean freight forwarding, contract logistics, customs brokerage and other logistics-related services. The company serves a large and diverse base of global and local companies, including customers operating in industries with unique supply chain requirements such as the pharmaceutical, apparel, chemical, automotive and technology industries. The company seeks to use its global network, proprietary information technology systems, relationships with transportation providers and expertise in outsourced logistics services to optimize the operation of its customers' global supply chains.