ENECO Energie Unlocks Performance with Cognos CPM Solution

– Netherlands energy provider uses Cognos CPM solution to help gain detailed customer insight, unify legacy systems and processes, and provide consistent information across business units –

BURLINGTON, MA - November 1, 2005 - Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence and corporate performance management (CPM), today announced that ENECO Energie has deployed Cognos’ CPM solution across its organization to consolidate a wide range of systems and processes, and to achieve a better and more comprehensive profile of its customers for competitive advantage.

ENECO Energie serves approximately two million business and residential customers in the Netherlands and generates revenues of more than €3.5 billion. Facing the challenges of market de-regulation for the first time, it required a best-practice solution to pull data from dozens of systems, business applications, reporting tools and external sources to gain a comprehensive, consistent viewpoint for improved decision-making across the organization.

ENECO’s Cognos performance management platform has helped the company:

• Decrease its accounts receivable balance by approximately €10 million.
• Raise conversion rates on marketing campaigns
• Gain insights to segment customers for direct mailings for a savings of approximately €1 million. 
• Segment customers according to their value which allows ENECO to make highly informed decisions to continue increasing customer value.
• Gain higher process efficiencies in its customer contact center and billing department resulting in a savings of approximately € 2.5 million.
• Gain market share

“With Cognos, we now have the ability to manage performance and customer interactions based on top-quality and timely information. The system has helped us turn data assets into actionable information to enable faster, more informed and more significant decisions that drive higher business performance and competitive advantage,” said Ton van den Dungen, manager, business intelligence and control, ENECO Energie. “We now have a stronger customer focus through automated scorecards with goal-oriented KPIs, a consistent framework for data, processes and technology, and the right amount of visibility to support future business requirements.”

With the Balanced Scorecard methodology and a solid data warehouse as the base of its approach to CPM, ENECO Energie created an integrated BI portal and a dedicated BI Intelligence Center to generate everything from scorecards via standard prepared reports to views on OLAP cubes and ad-hoc queries. Reporting functions are driven by Cognos ReportNet and managed from the company’s scorecard which is based on Cognos’ metrics management capabilities.

The company can now proactively manage its business performance with consistent facts and reliable information across the organization for more effective operations. ENECO Energie now has a comprehensive view of customer behavior and can focus on how its customers use ENECO Energie products (both high and low margin); and track customers’ call and payment behavior trends. With Cognos’ CPM solution, ENECO Energie is able to focus on optimizing processes and can clearly see the opportunities for cost reduction and further process improvements across the business.

Cognos solutions for performance management combine the forward management view of the business (planning, budgeting, and forecasting) with the current and historical view of the business (financial consolidations, scorecarding, reporting, and analysis). These integrated operational and financial views across all relevant time horizons lets customers proactively address business challenges for greater operational effectiveness

“Cognos customers like ENECO Energie are benefiting from the combination of internal thought leadership and a strong partnership with Cognos as we work together to continue to set the bar for the performance management market,” said Dave Laverty, senior vice-president, global marketing, Cognos. “ENECO Energie’s solid focus on business goals, combined with the strategic application of our industry-leading solutions, provides a best-practice performance management example for other companies to emulate and admire.”

The Cognos Performance Management Platform integrates the best-in-class scorecarding and dashboarding, planning, analysis, query and reporting, and event management capabilities that organizations and partners need to build performance management solutions for sustainable competitive advantage.

About Cognos:

Cognos delivers the next level of competitive advantage - Corporate Performance Management (CPM) - achieved through the strategic application of BI on an enterprise scale. Our integrated CPM solution helps customers drive performance through planning; monitor performance through scorecarding; and understand performance through business intelligence.

Cognos serves more than 23,000 customers in over 135 countries. Cognos enterprise business intelligence and performance management solutions and services are also available from more than 3,000 worldwide partners and resellers. For more information, visit the Cognos Web site at http://www.cognos.com.