BUSINESS

Customer Perspective: Business Intelligence in Every Department

July 12, 2006

"Cognos is a supplier that is continually developing its products to the highest standards. What ultimately convinced us, though, was the fact that Cognos provides solutions that cover the entire business." – Marina Glodzei, Project Manager, Business Intelligence Applications, Coloplast GMBH

Improving the quality of life for people with physical disabilities is the mission that Coloplast has set itself with its range of products in the areas of ostomy, incontinence, and wound care. Fulfilling this goal requires an optimal understanding of customers' needs. To ensure that such information is more easily accessible throughout its organisation, Coloplast has adopted a range of Cognos performance management solutions.

The need for integrated information

Coloplast needed access to specific information, such as sales figures on a region-by-region basis. To make such figures accessible, Coloplast had been working with solutions and spreadsheets created in-house. Difficulty lay in the fact that information was not available centrally, but instead had to be gathered together from different systems in a time-consuming and inefficient way. Business processes were unnecessarily protracted and error-prone.

A solution had to be found that could bring together information from across the company and allow it to be effectively used for product sales and marketing.

Solutions for the entire business

To remedy this situation, Coloplast decided to adopt Cognos performance management solutions. The project was implemented with assistance from Novem, a Hamburg-based partner of Cognos. Marina Glodzei explained the company's decision in the following terms: "Cognos is a supplier that is continually developing its products further-to the highest standards. What ultimately convinced us, though, was the fact that Cognos provides solutions that cover the entire business."

Today Coloplast is a user of virtually the entire range of Cognos solutions for reporting, data integration, planning, monitoring, and analysis.

"We started off with Cognos data management, which we used to set up interfaces with our existing systems, and we then introduced the Cognos analysis solution," says Glodzei. By then Coloplast had also been working with the Cognos partner company Novem to develop a large-scale data warehouse as a basis for reporting.

Overnight, the data warehouse is fed with data from all of the main systems, including order logging, accounting, customer relationship management and payroll. This formed the foundation for Coloplast's implementation of the Cognos reporting and analysis solutions as well as Cognos Planning.

Used by every department

The aim was to set up a business intelligence platform that could be used by every department. Cognos PowerPlay is now used for analysing data in, for example, the Management Accounting and Sales departments. With the help of the data cubes, users can view data and see how different sets of information are related to one another from a variety of perspectives.

As an example, discounts authorized in practice can be compared to the agreed levels of discount, production costs can be set against sales figures, and the particular characteristics of different customer groups, sales channels, and territories can be investigated.

Management accountants can also analyze how different types of costs have risen or fallen in comparison with budgets and with the previous year's figures. The Customer Care department draws particular benefit from the standardized reports generated by using the Cognos reporting solution. Thanks to the solution, users can create summaries, analyses, and ad-hoc enquiries that meet their specific requirements.

The Cognos Planning module is used for management planning purposes. Thanks to this solution, company executives can plan out sales, costs, and deployment of staff, modify these on an ongoing basis, and use these plans to identify strategic, tactical, and operational measures.

"Almost every employee of the business is a Cognos user," says Glodzei. "With Cognos, we have a very broad platform for use by every employee. In addition, thanks to the combination of several integrated Cognos products, we have the opportunity to tackle different requirements from individual departments. This allows us to offer an enterprise-wide solution that also meets the specific needs of various user groups."

Deployed in three weeks

The Coloplast employees can work independently with the solutions adopted, notably with the analysis solution of Cognos. "The major benefit of Cognos is the fact that the software can be rapidly deployed – that's something I'm convinced of as a Cognos user for nine years now," adds Glodzei. "For instance, it took us less than three weeks to link the data management in to our systems. And with the Cognos reporting solutions we were able to create a package of standard reports after only a short period."

"Implementing Cognos solutions was the right decision to make," Glodzei believes. "Our employees can access the information they need very rapidly. Thanks to the thorough coverage of every department we can react more quickly to market requirements. And ultimately, we are benefiting increased market penetration and an optimum understanding of our markets."

Streamlined processes increase agility

Cognos performance management solutions enable Coloplast to ensure that important information is rapidly and easily accessible to every user. Since the organization is deploying solutions that are configured to work with one another, all employees receive exactly the information they need for their own areas of work. Coloplast benefits from improved business processes and an ability to react to market requirements more quickly."