Business Objects Awards Five Customers for Excellence in Business Intelligence

American Red Cross, PepsiCo, Inc., Pfizer Inc, The Principal Financial Group, and Sumitomo Corporation Recognized at Business Objects International User Conference

Business Objects International User Conference, Las Vegas -- October 23, 2001 -- The ability to make a quick decision with your head requires information at your fingertips. Today Business Objects, the leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, honored five companies who excel at using BI to take an immediate pulse of their business through executive dashboards, enterprise-wide deployments, and extranets. BI solutions have enabled these five companies to get a better understanding of their businesses and their customers, and determine what actions they need to take to succeed today, tomorrow, and next year.

Today Business Objects presented the Business Objects Customer Excellence Award to five customers who are capitalizing on BI, and leveraging its power in all places, at all times – from every desktop to every business process. American Red Cross, PepsiCo, Inc., Pfizer Inc, The Principal Financial Group, and Sumitomo Corporation received the awards at the 2001 Business Objects International User Conference in Las Vegas.

“Our technology lets customers harness the single most important asset the company owns – information. Information is power, and with our software, it is the power to save money, make money, and see an immediate return on investment on a daily basis,” said Bernard Liautaud, CEO of Business Objects. “Because of this power, we are seeing business intelligence transform from a departmental, back office application, to an enterprise-wide, mission critical business application. We congratulate our five winners who have made BI a key in their strategy to increase revenue, cost savings, operational efficiency, and competitive advantage.”

Following is a brief description of this year’s winners:

• American Red Cross: The American Red Cross is America’s most trusted charity in its third century of service. It is the world’s largest, most efficient blood banking database, and uses Business Objects solutions to monitor its blood inventory. For example, using business intelligence, The American Red Cross can determine how much blood is available in its 36 regions across the United States. This information is critical when disaster strikes because the American Red Cross needs to know how much blood and the types of blood that are available. In addition, business intelligence helps the American Red Cross strengthens its management decisions concerning the manufacturing of all its blood products. Business Objects provides both the regional blood centers, and the national headquarters management with easy access to information about blood products inventory, financials, and human resources management.
  


• PepsiCo, Inc.: PepsiCo is a world leader in convenient foods and beverages, with 2000 revenues of over $25 billion and more than 135,000 employees. PepsiCo uses Business Objects as its Enterprise reporting standard. More than 6,000 users across the Accounting, Finance, Front Office, Human Resources, Information Technology, Manufacturing, Operations, Purchasing, Quality, Research and Development, Sales, and Supply Chain functional areas spanning multiple divisions rely on Business Objects solutions.
  
  By creating an Enterprise Business Intelligence Environment that is easily scaleable and extendable, it makes it very easy for new projects to "plug-in" to the existing business intelligence environment. This provides project teams the ability to leverage a common enterprise infrastructure, support, and consulting team that is already in place. Project teams can then build experience in one tool suite, and focus on creating business solutions for their functional customers, rather than learning new tools and building and supporting separate infrastructures. The ability this environment provides enables PepsiCo to significantly decrease overall costs and shorten "customer solution" delivery time.
  


• Pfizer Inc: Pfizer Inc is one of the world’s largest drug manufacturers and a Fortune 500 company. The Research and Development arm of Pfizer Inc, Pfizer Global Research and Development (PGRD), is in the process of a global deployment of Business Objects 5i to support the timely and effective distribution of information in the enterprise. Pfizer has made a commitment to Business Objects as a reporting and business intelligence solution. Managers within the organization will be able to access information regarding budgeting, resource management, finance, and procurement. This information will allow them to more effectively manage the over 4 billion spent on R&D each year in the drug discovery and development process.
  


• The Principal Financial Group: The Principal Financial Group is a global provider of financial services and products. The company’s Group National Accounts division uses Business Objects solutions to provide an extranet to its corporate customers that allows them to obtain an improved understanding and control of their medical benefits. National Accounts customers, who are large employers with self-funded medical plans, enjoy several benefits from access to the extranet. To begin with, customers now have direct access via the internet to important data about their medical benefits program. They can view information related to total claims, claims per region or business unit, historical costs, and number of instances in which employees receive care outside the network. Access to this information helps companies identify trends that may be costly to their business and make changes to their benefits plan to makes sure their plan is effective from both a benefits and cost standpoint.
  


• Sumitomo Corporation: Sumitomo Corporation, the world’s 15th largest company and one of Japan’s largest trading companies, uses Business Objects as its enterprise reporting standard. Sumitomo Corporation relies on Business Objects solutions to create reports that are distributed via its Global Management Cockpit (GMC), the company’s business intelligence system, to hundreds of executives on a monthly basis. The GMC is Sumitomo Corporation’s innovative corporate portal designed to give managers immediate access to key business metrics across several hundred subsidiaries and geographic regions. Data from more than 700 consolidated subsidiaries, spreading across 190 worldwide regions is available to over 500 managers throughout Sumitomo Corporation. By making the information available to Sumitomo Management in a cockpit format, the top executives of the company will have self-services access to a consistent and accurate view of their business.