from DSSResources.comCognos customers honored at Cognos Forum 2006BURLINGTON, Mass., July 5, 2006 -- At its annual customer conference in Las Vegas last week, Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, awarded nine of its customers with Cognos Leadership Awards. The winners demonstrate world-class business intelligence implementations or innovation in financial planning and control. Cognos awarded Del Monte Foods (http://www.delmonte.com/) with the Impact Through Technical Innovation Award, which recognizes the individuals and teams that have led business change and achieved demonstrated impact for the organization through the application of Cognos solutions. Del Monte's implementation of Cognos has improved financial visibility of promotional trade spending. A portfolio of analytical capabilities were developed which now provide senior and middle management with a concise view of the business, empowering Sales and Finance with the tools to manage their trade spending more effectively and efficiently. Cognos awarded GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) Canada (http://www.gsk.ca/en/) with its Operational Excellence Award in recognition of a line of business that has achieved operational excellence in a key performance area for their organization. In partnership with Cognos, GSK Canada leveraged their rich information assets to streamline reporting as well as to gain a standardized view of the business across multiple divisions within the company. This also served as an enabler for GSK Canada to provide greater business value through the overall decision-making processes made possible by being able to provide more robust reporting in a timely manner. This has been achieved in part through the long-term relationship between Cognos and GSK Canada as well as more recently through the work the two are doing in a joint Cognos 8 development partnership. Manpower (http://www.manpower.com) was awarded the CFO Excellence Award, which honors a CFO who has leveraged Cognos solutions to increase visibility and control over financial and operational performance for their organization. Manpower uses Cognos to derive key performance targets directly from the company's business plans and is able to apply the targets automatically and seamlessly to scorecards. Over 5000 users across Manpower's global finance, operations, customer reporting, sales and marketing departments use Cognos planning, reporting and analysis capabilities to streamline financial and operational processes. Zimmer (http://www.zimmer.com) was recognized with the Innovation and Best Practices Award for the finance organization that has leveraged Cognos Enterprise Planning solutions to improve and sustain enterprise planning, financial management and control and strategy execution best practices. Labatt Breweries of Canada (http://www.labatt.com/), TNT Express (http://www.tnt.com) and ENECO Energie (http://www.eneco.nl/investorrelations/) were honored with Performance Visionary Awards as organizations that have achieved game-changing business impact through the use of Cognos solutions, have defined a vision for achieving performance leadership or have enabled business performance in new ways with tangible business impact. Labatt Breweries of Canada used Cognos to create a Corporate Performance Management environment with standardized reporting and definitions. The company created integrated planning tools across different business areas and created a tighter linkage between planning and target setting. Labatt Breweries of Canada has standardized and integrated planning with business monitoring through scorecards, reports and analysis across different functions and roles within their business. TNT Express UK & Ireland will use Cognos to improve utilization of the resources deployed, and to enable a focus on value creating activities that truly contribute towards achieving strategic aims and objectives. This improved process will also enable all areas of the business to work together more effectively on long term planning. As a result of all of the above process changes, planning will be, more accurate, aligned with company objectives with a greater degree of ownership and sense of fairness. An improvement in the speed of delivery of this process also gives the ability to forecast more often and evaluate potential strategic options on a latest base case expectation. This is particularly important as the rate of change within the industry has accelerated over recent years. ENECO Energie is the third largest energy company in the Netherlands. Using Cognos, the company now has precise customer segmentation which has resulted in a saving of indirect marketing costs as well as helped improve conversion rates on marketing campaigns of 1 Million Euro a year. The company has also established an advanced warning system of customer shifts, consumption patterns, and competitive assaults and has increased efficiency with its customer contact center and billing departments of 2.5 Million Euro. New Customer Awards for 2006 The Performance Metrics Excellence Award was introduced as a new award this year: WestJet (http://www.westjet.com) was honored for Performance Metrics Excellence. This award recognizes the organization that has best harnessed Cognos solutions to monitor and manage key operational metrics enterprise wide. With Cognos, WestJet can better streamline profitability analysis and improve organizational effectiveness over their financial reporting processes. This achievement has lead to enormous improvements in how quickly the company can measure, react and respond to market change. See: http://www.cognos.com/news/releases/2006/0628_2.html. "Our solutions make sharing answers and insights across business effortless so stakeholders can make informed decisions, turn strategy into action, and optimize corporate performance," said Dave Laverty, senior vice president and chief marketing officer, Cognos. "Today, we are celebrating those customers who have shown leadership across IT and the Office of Finance, areas in which technology is leveraged to innovate business processes, improve business performance, enhance revenue, operational efficiency, and competitiveness." About Cognos: Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, provides world-class enterprise planning and BI software and services to help companies plan, understand and manage financial and operational performance. Cognos brings together technology, analytical applications, best practices, and a broad network of partners to give customers a complete performance system. The Cognos performance system is an open and adaptive solution that leverages an organization's ERP, packaged applications, and database investments. It gives customers the ability to answer the questions -- How are we doing? Why are we on or off track? What should we do about it? -- and enables them to understand and monitor current performance while planning future business strategies. Cognos serves more than 23,000 customers in more than 135 countries, and its top 100 enterprise customers consistently outperform market indexes. Cognos 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. Cognos and the Cognos logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cognos Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. All other names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Media Contacts: Carrie Bendzsa Cognos, Inc. 613-738-1440 carrie.bendzsa@cognos.com |