Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions,announced today that L’Oréal UK has implemented Cognos Planning to automate existing spreadsheet-based business processes and improve reporting efficiencies.

The world’s leading cosmetics manufacturer, working with Cognos partner BI Inform, chose Cognos Planning to drive the development of joint business plans for major retailers that sell its range of L’Oréal Paris, Garnier and Maybelline products.

L’Oréal UK’s national accounts team, which works with retailers including Tesco, Asda, Boots and Morrisons, is using Cognos to improve planning and forecasting visibility. By taking customers’ electronic point of sale (EPOS) data, the national accounts team can develop unit, sales and profit margin projections including built-in key performance indictors that are tailored to each customer’s requirements. In addition, scenario modeling can be used to forecast the success of customer promotions or L’Oréal-led promotions and track how seasonal variations may impact sales and profits.

Previously, L’Oréal had been using spreadsheets but, given the range of products and level of sales in the UK, these had become difficult to manage and highly administrative intensive. As a result, account managers spent the majority of their time reconciling manual analysis.

“The spreadsheets that the national accounts team had been using prior to the rollout of Cognos Planning had become gargantuan,” explained Keith Mattocks, project leader, Sales and Marketing IT at L’Oréal UK. “Not only that, every time a new scenario needed to be created, our account managers had to start again from scratch. This meant spending hours reworking the spreadsheets and inputting new data.”

“Cognos’ initial demonstration of what its technology could do literally sold it on the spot,” Mattocks continued. “We can now demonstrate to customers the effect of various different scenarios much more quickly than before, in minutes rather than hours. This gives them the information they need to make vital decisions in the fast moving retail sector.”

“L’Oréal is well respected for its technological innovation and its approach to working with its major retail partners is no different,” said Dave Laverty, senior vice-president and chief marketing officer, Cognos. “This is a classic story of a company struggling with spreadsheets and turning to Cognos to provide a secure, spreadsheet-like environment that is robust for the enterprise.”

L’Oréal, working with BI Inform, took the classic project route, developing the technology spec from the ground up. Following an initial review of the business need, workshops were held with potential users to set the project requirements ensuring a solution was developed to meet their needs.

The rollout of the Cognos application began in October 2006 and was completed by the end of the year.

“Sage is unique because instead of choosing which of its stakeholders to satisfy first — owners, guests, or associates — it is successfully fulfilling the requirements of all three simultaneously,” said Courteney Parker, Senior Vice President — Financial Services for Sage Hospitality Resources. “We designed our entire corporate technology infrastructure, hospitality accounting software and hotel management software to accomplish this task.”

Until recently Sage used a number of separate systems that included accounting, guest services, and ADP reporting applications to generate information to be manually entered into a corporate macro-based version of Excel. The process was lengthy and labor intensive, and the output was not available to managers until month-end. This changed in mid 2005 when Sage upgraded its corporate information systems by consolidating all of its operating, accounting, and guest data in a single centralized business intelligence software database for instant management access to operating information.

Sage installed the Execuvue® Cognos-based business intelligence system from Aptech Computer Systems to house and organize the combined operating data from its properties and make it readily accessible to managers. “We use to spend most of our time reviewing and entering data from separate systems. Now we are utilizing an enterprise business intelligence software system and our focus is on analyzing our property information for better decisions.” Sage is using its new business intelligence application to provide operating information from every property and department down to the account line level. It also uses Aptech’s Targetvue® budgeting and forecasting tool to automate ‘what-if’ analysis, in conjunction with Execuvue to create advanced flexible reports for owners and managers. “Both applications are Cognos-based. We chose to work with Aptech and install its tools because they know the hospitality business and how to apply the right technology.”

Parker reports that Sage has also transformed the way it thinks about many areas of its operations thanks to the new database technology. “We used to enter our budget numbers on a blank sheet to work through the ‘what-if’ mathematics, but Targetvue enables us to roll our actual data into go-forward forecasts we can quickly modify. Our managers enter percent increases or decreases to existing budgets to create global changes that test the impact of a possible strategy. They do not have to adjust every line.”

Having continuous access to all its propertys’ operating information is providing Sage the tools to build management dashboards based on actual performance compared against Targetvue forecasts. “The Aptech database, reporting, and budgeting tools are all part of the central Sage corporate system,” said Courteney Parker. “The Targetvue forecasting module is the main touch point for our property managers; they can look at budget metrics compared with daily performance side by side.” Parker also noted that being able to build customized PDF operating reports for its owners and managers any time during the month with Execuvue is a great operational improvement over the days when her team had to wait until month-end to analyze performance.

“My job for the past year has been to help all our properties understand how to access and analyze information in Sage’s new business intelligence database tool set,” said Brian Treadwell, Asset Manager for Sage Hospitality Resources. “Execuvue’s functionality allows managers to see a top-to-bottom P&L for their properties and query the information to improve their performance; they have never been able to do this before.”

Aptech assisted Sage’s IT team in creating the channels to move property data from its 48 hotels into new consolidated data tables to make it accessible to Sage’s executives for analysis. Brian Treadwell said, “Now we are able to perform nearly any type of comparative analysis to evaluate property performance any time in the month. With Execuvue and Targetvue all mining information from a single database, Sage only needs one application suite to make faster decisions based on current information.”

Cognos’ overall score increased by 4.3% over last year’s study, with Cognos 8 BI scoring highest for its ability to “align the business, and coordinate and drive individual actions based on information and performance targets.”

The Ventana Research Scorecard covers more than 11 vendors and is representative of independent analysis conducted over the past five years. Each participating company’s products were scored for functional requirements and capabilities to determine the level of compliance against Ventana Research’s PerformanceCycle™ across three categories – Align, Optimize and Understand.

According to the report, “the research assesses the maturity of software vendors and packages designed specifically for enabling Performance Management. It provides a baseline of knowledge that organizations can use to improve their understanding of how well different software and solutions may meet their business and IT requirements for performance management.”

“Building a robust performance management system is a modern executive imperative,” said Mark Smith, CEO and EVP Research, Ventana Research. “A solution’s ability to align the business involves leveraging historical benchmarks as a reference for driving change in the organization and individually. This capability enables goal setting, scoring, notifying and automating the performance management process.”

Cognos 8 BI is a groundbreaking product that provides decision makers at all levels of the enterprise with a consistent, accurate view of information to better manage performance. As a single product that easily integrates into existing infrastructures with multiple systems and data sources, Cognos 8 BI is a robust technology foundation for BI standardization and performance management.

“Cognos 8 BI helps align and connect people and processes across the organization for more effective decision-making,” said Dave Laverty, senior vice-president and chief marketing officer, Cognos. “The solution aligns all stakeholders with one reliable version of business issues, timely, actionable reports, and detailed analysis of business results for performance improvement.”

Cognos has been consistently ranked a performance management leader in both market share and leadership reports by leading independent analyst firms.

By standardizing on a single BI platform and upgrading to Cognos 8 BI, decision-makers throughout the organization – from executives to finance, supply chain and operations managers – will be able to capitalize on the complete range of reporting, analysis, dashboarding and scorecarding functionality to optimize inventory, increase customer loyalty and improve the overall customer shopping experience, regardless of channel.

B&H also licensed Cognos 8 Planning for financial planning and measuring performance against plans. In addition, B&H will integrate Cognos Performance Applications with its custom-developed ERP system, enabling the organization to get a jump start on enterprise-wide reporting for standard operational areas, such as general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable and procurement.

“It was important for us to bring in a full performance management suite at B&H because we pride ourselves on being a service-oriented organization,” said Moses Blum, director of IT business support, B&H Photo Video. “With Cognos, we will be able to improve the shopping experience of our customers, both consumers and professionals, regardless of whether they made their purchase on-line, by fax, by phone, or in our flagship store in New York. Performance management at B&H will allow us to continue to be the leader in our market.”

Cognos Business Intelligence, Cognos Planning and Cognos Performance Applications are key components within the Cognos Performance Management System, which aligns technology, best practices and a partner ecosystem to enable organizational agility and improve the decision-making process for organizations by connecting people and goals across operations and management functions with right-time, actionable information.

“Cognos helps deliver improved store and channel performance, increased profit margins and more effective operational cost management to leading global retailers such as B&H Photo Video,” said Patricia Vekich Waldron, retail industry director at Cognos. “With a full performance management solution, B&H will be able to increase visibility, accountability and profitability across the enterprise. It will also be able to leverage critical business data in order to plan and analyze operations, determine changing market demands, and collaborate with suppliers to ultimately drive higher customer satisfaction.”

Challenger is an established player in Australian financial services and listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. The company is focused on its four core business lines of mortgage management, funds management, asset management, and financial planning.

Challenger chose Cognos 8 BI and Cognos 8 Planning after an analysis of competitive options, which showed that Cognos 8 BI delivers a comprehensive set of BI capabilities on a single, Web-based services-oriented architecture. Combined with Cognos’ enterprise planning capabilities, it provides decision makers at all levels with a consistent, accurate view of information to better manage performance.

Challenger’s Enterprise Reporting System project was designed to enhance business reporting and streamline the budgeting and planning process across the organization. “We are taking an iterative prototyping approach to the implementation to ensure we deliver a system that is of ongoing value to the business,” said Brendan O’Connor, project sponsor at Challenger. “We expect to increase the speed and efficiency of our reporting and provide powerful analytical capability to our business.”

About Challenger

Challenger is an established player in Australian financial services, dedicated to providing smarter solutions to financial intermediaries and their clients, offering a broad spectrum of financial products and services.

Listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, Challenger has $38 billion of assets and loans under management/administration across four core businesses: mortgage management, making it one of Australia’s largest non-bank mortgage lenders; asset management, with strong expertise in infrastructure and property; a highly regarded funds management business across a number of asset classes and investment styles; and a financial planning business — Genesys Wealth Advisers.

As the leading vendor in Corporate Performance Management, GITEX provides an ideal platform for Cognos to meet clients and demonstrate how they can continue to drive their business forward while gaining insights on the regional enterprise technology market. The company will focus on its software – the hugely successful Cognos 8 Business Intelligence and Cognos 8 Planning. Cognos 8 BI is the industry’s first Web-services based solution that provides the complete range of BI functionalities in a single product on a proven, single architecture.

‘Cognos first attended GITEX last year and we increased our presence and share in the region,’ said Derek Morrison, regional general manager Cognos Middle East. ‘The event helped us generate significant leads and raise the profile of our brand while allowing us to meet with customers and potential prospects,’

Current estimates from IDC predict that in the region the UAE and Saudi Arabia account for 77 per cent of the Gulf’s current IT spend of $4.94 billion and industry estimates show that the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) IT market is set to grow to US $13.4 billion by 2008.

‘It provides the ideal networking opportunity to meet the right target audience from all over the region. We have experienced phenomenal success with Cognos 8 BI and will be looking to build on that success at this year’s exhibition. The Gulf region is key to our Middle East market and we have invested in the best partners and staff to support customers and prospects in the region,’ Morrison added.

The new version of Cognos 8 BI launched earlier this year includes new search and reporting capabilities to extend the reach of business intelligence to more users, and expand enterprise-application and data support to help maximise operational infrastructure investments.

Designed for companies with even the most complex business models, Cognos 8 Planning is a fully integrated, state-of- the-art, highly scalable solution for planning, budgeting and forecasting. Cognos 8 Planning integrates operational and financial planning in real time for immediate visibility into resource requirements and future business performance.

Cognos 8 Planning is a cornerstone of the Cognos performance management platform, and offers market leading solutions for management and financial reporting, analysis, scorecards and dashboards, event detection, and notification.

Cognos can be found at GITEX 2006 at the DIC zone, stand number 26.

Cognos has launched a software module that allows U.S. Defence agencies to meet new standards for program management and budget planning.

Cognos POM Planning Blueprint will allow defense agencies to produce a comprehensive program objective memorandum, detailing all proposed programs, so that cross-departmental budget expense planning can be based on measurable goals. The blueprint enables budget officers or analysts to deploy demand planning to the appropriate departmental level to more efficiently determine anticipated agency needs for the coming years.

“Using Cognos has enabled us to develop a more efficient, closed-loop budgeting and planning process, where resources allocations could be easily modeled, then prioritized according to the value of outcomes. This affords us the necessary agility to manage tradeoffs and better accommodate increased program requirements,” says James Russell, executive director of financial and business operations and controller at U.S. Defense Contract Management Agency.

“Static, spreadsheet-based budget formulation and financial modeling processes fall well short in delivering valuable insight into an agency’s performance and long-range program needs,” says Terence Atkinson, director of government and education solutions at Cognos.

Cognos software is already in use at several U.S. defence agencies, including the U.S. Army Reserve, U.S. Marine Corps, and U.S. Coast Guard.

The electronics vendor is currently undertaking a pilot implementation of the Cognos 8 Business Intelligence suite for 25 users that will then be expanded to hundreds of users as the system grows over the course of the year.

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The solution will be rolled out by Cognos partner Tahola, a retail solutions specialist. It will be used by the finance team to prepare annual, quarterly and monthly reports and rolling forecasts into sales figures, retail trends and profit margins.

Currently, the finance team at Joseph relies on spreadsheet applications to manage its budgeting and planning. The company takes a bottom up approach, from store level upwards, resulting in a very cumbersome and complex process. Any subsequent changes to the data can slow the whole procedure down even further and result in inaccuracies in the final reports.

“By implementing Cognos Planning we’ll be able to do away with the complex spreadsheet system that we use at present and prepare budgets and forecasts more quickly and more accurately than before – an absolute must in the fast moving retail sector,” explained Kathleen Starkey, finance director at Joseph. “For the first time, we’ll be able to truly integrate profit and loss (P&L), balance sheet and cash flow information, leading to better business management all round.”

“Working with Tahola we’ve found a partner with an excellent track record in retail and one that really understands our business. The team demonstrated a real dedication to making the project happen,” Starkey added.

“Joseph was struggling with the same problems that many retailers face, namely the inflexibility of spreadsheets as enterprise planning and forecasting tools. Cognos Planning will resolve all of those issues while providing the capabilities to easily test many different ‘what-if’ scenarios. We look forward to working with the team at Joseph,” said Geoff McClure, managing director of Tahola Ltd.

“Our technology will give the finance team at Joseph valuable insight into sales information, trends and margins, enabling the company as a whole to improve its budgeting and planning practices,” said Dave Laverty, senior vice-president, Global Marketing, Cognos.

Tahola will begin the implementation of Cognos Planning in February 2006 and the solution is due to go live in early March 2006.