Cognos e-applications Fast Time to Success. Immediate Business Results. www.cognos.com
Cognos e-applications transform business-critical data into a readily available global view of our customers and our operations. We deployed the solution in considerably less time and at greatly reduced cost than building in-house, ensuring immediate business value for our front-line users. Mickey Stellberg, Manager, Executive Information Systems, Information Technology, Dade Behring Cognos e-applications
THE PACE OF BUSINESS IS ACCELERATING. Success in the Internet economy requires fast, decisive responses to complex business challenges. It means maximizing competitive advantage, keeping pace with rapid technological change, and anticipating and responding to evolving customer needs. Let s face it Success today means getting it right the first time. e-business is forcing companies to rethink their entire business model, to play by entirely new business rules. It is driving them to embrace the concept of the intelligent enterprise, to harness corporate information no matter where it resides and use it to build closer customer and supplier relationships, manage costs, and improve profitability. Traditionally, decision-makers faced with this task were compelled to build customized applications requiring considerable investments in time, money, and people. Today, in order to keep up with the accelerating pace of e-business, decision-makers are demanding solutions that deliver immediate value, out of the box. They want to get to the why of their business in the fastest possible time. And they want to share that information with the right people at the right time, in the most usable format. The challenge: to transform the massive amounts of data that reside within a company s operational systems into meaningful, actionable insights, all at e-speed; to harness information drawn from multiple divisions and systems including enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems such as SAP, Oracle Applications, and J.D. Edwards and present it in a format that provides a clear, 360-degree view of the entire business.
YOU HAVE INFORMATION. YOU NEED ANSWERS. It s about thinking smart and acting fast. It s about using the information that already resides within your organization to improve business performance. Cognos e-applications are your key strategic asset in today s competitive marketplace. Dynamic market conditions and increased customer expectations are driving companies to extend the value of their existing operational systems. Clearly, companies that can accelerate their decision-making processes to match the pace of business execution will be best positioned to eclipse the competition. As such, they are turning to function-specific data marts to leverage and integrate their data assets: to optimize analysis, to improve decision-making, and to create stronger, more profitable relationships with customers and suppliers. Cognos e-applications are pre-packaged, businessready analysis and reporting solutions that satisfy an organization s most urgent need: to identify, understand, and act upon the forces directly impacting your key operational processes. With e-applications from Cognos, organizations have the tools to quickly and efficiently draw data from corporate data sources into decision-ready data marts, perform in-depth analysis across key functional areas, and share that information with customers, partners, and suppliers over the Internet, intranets, and extranets. Each e-application functions as a complete end-to-end BI solution, providing defined extractions and data models, proven business content and best practices displayed through captured business metrics, and a full suite of key performance indicators (KPIs), reports, and analyses. They are the fastest, most cost-effective way to implement a robust, flexible enterprise solution built on industry best practices. And because Cognos e-applications share common terms and dimensions, you get an integrated, big-picture view of your entire organization across all departments, regardless of whether you deploy e-applications incrementally or as an integrated whole. Everybody speaks the same language and sees consistent information.
Cognos shows every indication that it can keep its customers ahead of the e-business demand curve with powerful applications that reduce the time to success for corporate and departmental decision-makers. Aberdeen Group, 2000 www.cognos.com/eapplications
Enterprises deliberating over the build-versus-buy issue for data marts finally have a very persuasive technological/business argument for buying a packaged application. Aberdeen Group, 2000 Cognos e-applications
SPEED. RELIABILITY. FLEXIBILITY. With Cognos e-applications, your organization benefits from the features most critical to your success today: speed, reliability, and flexibility. The result: maximum return on investment and a jumpstart on the competition. Speed Optimized for speed, pre-configured e-applications supply everything you need to implement a robust analysis and reporting solution in a fraction of the time it would take to build a customized application from scratch. Each e-application provides high performance relational and multidimensional query and viewing options to ensure fast time-to-results. Flexibility Cognos e-applications are fully extensible. Organizations can tailor their analysis and reporting capabilities and incorporate new functionality as their business changes. Moreover, they can be deployed across client-server as well as Internet, intranet, and extranet environments. Reliability Cognos e-applications leverage industry-leading best practices and experience gained from thousands of Cognos customers worldwide. The breadth, depth, and availability of its reporting and analysis environment ensures that business decision-makers get the answers they need, when they need them, wherever they are. And by introducing common business definitions and measures enterprise-wide, e-applications ensure consistent, repeatable results across all functional groups.
BUSINESS-READY. E-READY. PRODUCTION-READY. In today s wired world where survival is defined by how smart and how fast you act, companies must get business-critical intelligence into the hands of decision-makers, customers and suppliers in the fastest possible time. High-performance, Web-ready e-applications combine user-ready functionality, rich business content and a robust technical environment to ensure fast time-to-success and immediate ROI. Business-Ready Cognos e-applications deliver actionable insights to every type of user, from analysts to line managers, customers, and suppliers. Pre-defined business metrics based on best business practices, a comprehensive suite of key performance indicators (KPIs), and numerous reports ensure you get the answers you need faster. Decision-makers can easily explore key business drivers using a powerful graphical interface. You get quick access to the information you need whether you re identifying sales opportunities, analyzing financial statements, or improving forecasts and budgets the way you need it: over the Web, through a Windows client, or in Excel format. e-ready Web-ready e-applications provide the tools you need to read or pull data from both e-commerce sources and more traditional sources like corporate databases and ERP systems. By sharing this information with customers, suppliers, and business partners via a secure Web portal, organizations can build formidable internal and external information relationships that drive operational effectiveness, sustained profitability, and customer satisfaction. Decision-makers throughout the enterprise will gain immediate access to the information they require to improve processes and performance. Production-Ready Cognos e-applications supply everything you need to implement a robust, reliable business analysis and reporting solution immediately without sacrificing your existing IT infrastructure. From data mart building to generating key reports and analysis, these packaged end-to-end solutions can be up and running in a fraction of the time it takes to start from scratch. Easy to configure, deploy, extend, and maintain, you simply add the data and go.
Operational Framework Cognos unique Operational Framework and centralized management console make it even easier to configure, deploy and manage e-applications. Combining ease-of-use and robust functionality, the operational framework allows administrators to quickly deploy and centrally manage e-applications based on common business metrics and shared dimensions. In addition, administrators can quickly integrate new applications, schedule updates, extend data models, data transformations and KPIs, and support slowly changing dimensions. Using common dimensions (such as customer and location) and a shared Operational Framework as the primary integration point between applications, an enterprise can create a cross-functional view of the business as well as underpin additional Cognos analytic applications. Aberdeen Group, 2000 www.cognos.com/eapplications
Cognos Sales Analysis e-application was the perfect springboard for delivering the level of functionality and flexibility we required. It helped us to free up significant development resources and already accounts for noticeable cost reductions. And support from Cognos throughout the implementation ensured our rapid success. Mickey Stellberg, Manager, Executive Information Systems, Information Technology, Dade Behring Sales Analysis
SALES ANALYSIS E-APPLICATION Transform raw data into increased sales while developing a stronger understanding of your customers with Cognos Sales Analysis e-application. Evaluate discount practices, target key customers who generate the highest margins, and identify those clients who cost the most. As your customer relationship management enabler, Cognos lets you select from a variety of key performance metrics and decision-ready reports to improve forecast accuracy, analyze pipeline volume, profile leads, calculate average deal size, and examine revenues and profitability. Sales Analysis e-application harnesses the information you need to make decisions that will help you get and keep customers, close sales faster, and generate more revenue. Sales Analysis e-application lets you accomplish such business-critical activities as: Increasing customer satisfaction and boosting win rates Better understanding the buying habits of your customers Enriching the way you interact with customers Improving forecasts and budgets Analyzing channels, industries, customers, order types, product groups from unlimited perspectives
FINANCIAL ANALYSIS E-APPLICATION With businesses facing increased competition and tighter margins, managers are required to quickly and accurately interpret the financial implications of their business activities. Financial Analysis e-application from Cognos lets you examine trends, trace shifts in cost structures, and pinpoint issues or opportunities that might impact profitability. Financial Analysis e-application provides comprehensive analysis and reporting functionality to help shorten reconciliation, period-end closings, and financial reporting and distribution cycles. Whether analyzing income statements, balance sheets, cash flows, or key financial ratios, the Financial Analysis e-application gives managers the critical information they need to take decisive action. Financial Analysis e-application makes it easy for financial departments to: Identify shifts in cost structure at any operational level over time Enable managers to produce up-to-date reports on key financial ratios Pinpoint opportunities that drive profitability Compare financial performance versus plan Easily determine whether groups or departments are contributing to profit or revenue Allow financial professionals to analyze business performance With Financial Analysis e-application, your financial experts can spend more of their time analyzing the financial implications of your business instead of simply generating reports.
Financial Analysis e-application shortens the reconciliation cycle and helps overcome one of the most serious difficulties in most organizations: the prompt close. Aberdeen Group, 2000 Financial Analysis
Cognos shows every indication that it can keep its customers ahead of the e-business demand curve with powerful applications that reduce the time to success for corporate and departmental decision-makers. Aberdeen Group, 2000 Inventory Analysis
INVENTORY ANALYSIS SUITE OF E-APPLICATIONS Now more than ever, customer satisfaction and cash flow optimization is intimately tied to the effectiveness of an organization s supply chain management capabilities. Companies today must ensure that they have sufficient stock to meet demand without incurring excessive inventory costs. They must also forecast and plan for stock levels while identifying new opportunities to improve cash flow. Cognos Inventory Analysis Suite of e-applications helps organizations understand how the supply chain directly impacts their bottom line. They provide managers at all levels from senior executives to warehouse supervisors with the information necessary to make important decisions about their company s inventory. By providing valuable insight into your supply chain concentrating on inventory management, inventory consumption and demand, operational performance, inventory control, and forecast accuracy the Inventory Analysis Suite of e-applications helps you to: Increase customer satisfaction by meeting demand Better understand your investment in inventory and identify opportunities to improve cash flow Improve forecasts and budgets Analyze warehouse performance, material classes, movements, forecasts, physical inventory, and more The Cognos Inventory Analysis Suite of e-applications provides comprehensive decision-enabling functionality to increase your supply chain efficiency.
About Cognos As the world s leading vendor of Enterprise Business Intelligence solutions, Cognos plays a mission-critical role in making our customers successful. Cognos solutions leverage Internet technology to make information easily accessible to everyone in your enterprise, as well as to your customers and across your supply chain.the results: decision-making that is better coordinated across the entire organization. More effective customer acquisition and greater customer retention. Improved business performance at e-speed. Find out more about how your organization can benefit from Cognos e-applications. www.cognos.com/eapplications Cognos Web-based technology is a cornerstone of e-business. From the creation of data marts, to pre-built e-applications, to sophisticated reporting, analysis, and visualization, Cognos software delivers the breadth and flexibility organizations in all industries need in order to thrive in the Internet economy.
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. Stock No: 29037 August 2000 Printed in Canada using recyclable materials.