Cognos performance solution helps pharmaceutical companies drive clinical trial success


– Cognos Clinical Trial Enrolment Forecasting Blueprint offers flexible patient enrolment modelling and analytics, enabling managers to track enrolment progress, success of costly studies –


London, UK – September 12, 2007 – Cognos (NASDAQ: COGN; TSX: CSN), the leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, continues to extend its pharmaceutical market leadership. It has announced the launch of a new performance solution designed to help pharmaceutical companies better anticipate and manage patient enrolment requirements to ensure clinical trials successfully comply with FDA requirements.

Clinical trials represent one of the biggest direct-spend components in most pharmaceutical R&D budgets. Failure to enrol adequate numbers of patients is a primary reason why some clinical trials fail. The Cognos Clinical Trial Enrolment Forecasting Blueprint offers the robust forecasting and enrolment analytics pharmaceutical companies need to help ensure adequate patient participation in their clinical trials. The Blueprint maximises insights into enrolment indicators that can affect the progress of a costly study, and facilitates collaboration between managers, analysts and individual investigator sites. This helps make the necessary adjustments that strike the right balance between cost and performance.

“Customer-designed or commercial Clinical Trials Management Systems often lack the flexibility and forecasting capability pharmaceutical companies require to model the entire enrolment picture across the development portfolio. Spreadsheets do not offer a viable alternative as they can introduce substantial control risks and do not incorporate enterprise-class functionality such as managed workflow, and the ability to push template changes out to hundreds of users simultaneously,” said Bill Stevens, associate vice president of life sciences at Cognos. “The Cognos Clinical Trial Enrolment Blueprint offers an approach that eliminates typical concerns of data integrity and information silos. Managers gain ‘right-time’ visibility into the enrolment status of their study portfolio, enabling them to define, manage and measure critical performance indicators in an efficient and timely manner.”

Using out-of-the-box functionality from Cognos 8 Planning and Cognos 8 Business Intelligence (BI) – including dashboards, analytical reports and a pre-configured data model – and encompassing pharmaceutical industry best practices, the Cognos Clinical Trial Congas Forecasting Blueprint lets managers:

  • Capitalise on an advanced forecasting data model that calculates and presents for analysis a range of metrics, including planned vs. actual enrolment windows, site activations, and screen failure percentages
  • Drill into portfolio reports to undertake more detailed analyses of trial enrolment and performance, using up-to-date information from multiple transactional and planning systems
  • Forecast the impact of ‘on-the-fly’ changes using ‘What if’ planning and scenario analysis. Changes to one enrolment assumption automatically recalculates all of the impacted data instantly, eliminating the need for off-line number crunching and facilitating faster decision-making
  • Easily adjust business rules to best suit current trial management needs and adapt to sudden changes. New assumptions and rules can be quickly configured, tested and pushed out to end-users and analysts without requiring costly developers and complex coding
  • View the clinical site hierarchy through a powerful workflow capability that consolidates, in real time, data from the individual investigator-site level up through regions and countries

Available immediately to customers, the Cognos Clinical Trial Congas Forecasting Blueprint is the third pharmaceutical solution launched in the past year. Together with the Cognos Clinical Trial Forecasting Blueprint, launched in May 2006, the Blueprints enable customers to seamlessly update financial projections as their enrolment projections evolve, helping them better understand the cost of changes and the dollar effect of enrolment projections. The Cognos Sample Optimisation Blueprint, also released in May 2006, rounds out current pharmaceutical offerings.

Cognos is a recognised leader in delivering performance management solutions for the pharmaceutical industry. Currently, 25 of the top 30 pharmaceutical firms rely on Cognos performance management software, including Novartis, Bayer UK, and Quintiles Transnational. For more information about Cognos solutions for pharmaceuticals and life sciences, please visit www.cognos.com/lifesciences

About Cognos Performance Blueprints:
Cognos offers a full suite of Performance Blueprints to address planning and performance management process areas that directly impact an organisation’s ability to create business value. Both functional and industry-specific process areas can now be automated, streamlined and transformed to help organisations quickly create more business value. Developed by the Cognos Innovation Center for Performance Management, the Cognos Performance Blueprints are a key component within the Cognos Performance Management System, which combines technology, best practices, analytical applications and solutions, and a broad network of partners into a single performance management solution. For further information on the Cognos Performance Blueprints see http://www.cognos.com/innovationcenter/blueprint.html.

About Cognos, an IBM Company
Cognos, an IBM company, is the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions.

It provides world-class enterprise planning and BI software and services to help companies plan, understand and manage financial and operational performance.
Cognos was acquired by IBM in January 2008.

For more information, visit http://www.ibm.com/software/data/ and http://www.cognos.com/uk/

For further information about Cognos, please contact:
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