Leading SAP customers use Cognos Performance Management platform to drive effective decision-making

– World-class Cognos Performance Management capabilities combine with SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse to quickly enable high value business decisions for global organisations –

London, UK – October 15, 2007 – Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, has announced that customers worldwide are successfully enabling timely, high value enterprise wide business decisions by combining Cognos’ industry-leading performance management capabilities with their SAP ERP and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse.

Ventana Research has found that “most companies standardise their transaction processing (accounting, inventory management and so on) within core enterprise systems such as ERP or CRM because this software handles these sorts of repetitive and often interconnected tasks well. On the other hand, corporations have shown no preference for ERP when it comes to functions involving decision support and analytics; frequently they find that alternative approaches are better for their purposes.”*

Cognos delivers dynamic and effective globally scalable reporting, ad-hoc query, analysis, dashboarding and scorecarding capabilities alongside, and in conjunction with, SAP ERP and SAP NetWeaver Business Information Warehouse applications. These capabilities help organisations drive more effective performance management based decision-making. Global customers who are using Cognos 8 BI to extend their SAP solutions for managing best-in-class performance include Arla Foods, Bauhaus, Checkfree Corporation, Mainova, Mölnlycke Healthcare and Nestle.

Arla Foods is the second largest dairy company in Europe and a global supplier of dairy products for leading food producers throughout the world. The company has one of the largest production instances of SAP NetWeaver 2004 Business Information Warehouse worldwide and is currently using Cognos 8 BI to produce business reports for corporate reporting and timelier decision-making. One of these Cognos reports contains over 700 key figures, making it an extremely rich and complex business overview.

“Our internal and external knowledge workers receive daily reports according to their role and access rights,” said Ulrik Hinke, BI business process manager, Arla Foods. “With Cognos, we’ve been able to gain six hours a day in the critical month end closing period through the generation of reports in parallel, with effective email distribution and Cognos 8’s ability to support the presentation of complex information. Our employees have access to pertinent corporate data when they need it; without an ongoing reliance on specialised IT resources. The efficiency of our Cognos reporting platform helps us make effective business decisions in a very timely and efficient manner.”

BAUHAUS opened Germany’s first specialist DIY market in Mannheim in 1960. With its innovative concept BAUHAUS enabled shoppers to find everything they needed in a relaxed atmosphere under one roof. The concept proved to be a success: throughout Europe the company now employs more than 14,000 people in more than 185 outlets. With more than 28,000 m” of sales space, BAUHAUS in Düsseldorf-Gerresheim, Germany is now the largest DIY market across Europe.

“We have improved our reporting systems enormously with Cognos 8 BI. As a strategic extension to SAP BW and other data sources, Cognos 8 lets considerably more employees access important business information,” said the SAP BW Administrator for BAUHAUS. “Access is especially easy, flexible and fast. In the past, Head Office had to print individualised reports and mail them out. Now staff in the different outlets can open and analyse all the information they need in the portal. This reduces costs and our response times, which means that Cognos increases our competitiveness. Pioneers are always the first to lead – and that’s what we are with Cognos 8.”

CheckFree Corporation, is a leading provider of financial electronic commerce services and products. A Cognos BI customer for ten years, CheckFree uses Cognos 8 BI against SAP BW data to produce detailed financial forecasting and budgeting reports across multiple cost centers.

“By using Cognos 8 BI with SAP BW, we’ve been able to improve our employee usage rates through a more user-friendly, self-service reporting interface,” said Brian Davis, manager, enterprise report development, CheckFree. “Our data refresh rate has also improved from a 24-hour time period to hourly. Previously our financial analysts had to pull information from SAP and manually create reports within a spreadsheet. Now, the users can self-serve and our financial analysts are not overloaded and can focus on strategic analysis instead of manual data manipulation.”

Mainova AG is a leading German provider of electricity, heat and water. For Mainova, the rationale to invest in Cognos 8 BI on top of SAP BW stemmed from a computing environment that spanned multiple data sources and provided limited visibility to Mainova’s customer base. The sales, marketing, billing and finance departments now use analytical reports based on sales statistics that provide in-depth analysis of consumer behavior patterns in terms of revenue and consumption.

“By integrating Cognos 8 BI and SAP BW, we are efficiently addressing and managing our performance management challenges,” said Ismute Tews, Data Warehouse Project Manager, Mainova AG. “We now see customer needs directly and respond to requirements from our individual departments without delay. Cognos 8 for our BW data warehouse provides us with a proven and valuable economical advantage by delivering formatted information out of our BW system about sales markets and customer requirements as well as improving the collection of revenue and consumption data, while saving both time and money.”

Mölnlycke Health Care is one of the world’s leading providers of single-use surgical and wound care products and services to the healthcare sector. Mölnlycke selected Cognos 8 BI to provide employees with a consistent view of corporate information by combining data from its SAP and non-SAP systems across the enterprise.

“The success of our BI strategy is based on sailing on SAP BW and driving performance with
Cognos 8 BI,” said Roderick Mooren, IT Director, Mölnlycke Health Care. “Through the tight integration between Cognos and SAP, we have been able to consolidate all the information from our offices worldwide which has increased overall visibility into the organisation and enabled management to make more informed decisions.”

“Customer experience has shown us that building a successful performance driven enterprise tends not to be achievable with an ERP-only approach,” said Leah Macmillan, vice-president, product marketing, Cognos. “To build sustainable competitive advantage, organisations can look to the successful examples of Arla, Bauhaus, Checkfree, Mainova, and Molnlycke Healthcare. These organisations depend on interoperability with SAP and they rely on Cognos’ proven self-service capabilities and independent, market leading performance management platform to enable expedient delivery of complete and relevant information, from both SAP and non-SAP sources."

About Cognos 8 BI on SAP:
Cognos 8 BI is built on a proven Web services-based, services-oriented architecture and certified Powered by SAP NetWeaver®. For further information on Cognos software and solutions for SAP visit: http://www.cognos.com/solutions/data/sap/business_intelligence.html.

*Ventana Research, “When ERP is Not the Right Choice,” by Robert D. Kugel, October, 23, 2006. Article ID: V06-60.

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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