STORAGE

Cognos today announced that leading global organizations continue to turn to Cognos for innovations in scorecarding to help them better measure, communicate and manage business performance at a tactical, operational and strategic level. Scorecards let customers know how they are doing relative to established company targets. In information system terms, this usually translates to a list of key metrics that are "scored" with visual indicators such as traffic lights. According to industry analyst firm AMR Research, "Increasingly, successful companies are investing in tools to improve their tracking of the key indicators of operational performance. These companies effectively use information to improve business performance." AMR Research's EPM spending survey projects a 90% increase in the average number of seats for dashboards and scorecards per implementation over the next 18 months. Many Cognos customer executives and managers worldwide are introducing scorecarding as a natural extension to their reporting and analysis capabilities and as a core element of their corporate performance management initiatives. With Cognos scorecarding, they are able to gain greater visibility into key performance measures, link execution to overall business strategy across the enterprise and facilitate realignment to current realities through performance management processes such as planning and reporting across business units, operating subsidiaries or geographic regions. Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) is an agency of the United States Department of Defense whose primary mission is contract management for the military services. To help establish a quantitative metrics-based management culture, it first developed top-down performance metrics such as time expensed against key processes or quantities produced. "Cognos scorecarding capabilities have been extremely strategic to our performance management journey," said Jim Russell, Executive Director, Financial and Business Operations, and controller, DCMA. "With Cognos, we are benefiting from more reliable performance. By accurately measuring the performance of key business processes, we can establish more appropriate standards and hold the various operational groups accountable for achieving those standards. We also gain visibility into performance of customer's desired outcomes and our supporting processes and tasks at all organizational levels." Mueller Inc is a leading manufacturer of pre-engineered metal building and residential metal roofing products. Mueller recognized that the scorecard was critical to communicating its business strategy. Using the Balanced Scorecard methodology, underpinned by Cognos scorecarding technology, the company has identified key performance indicators for finance, customers, internal processes, learning and growth. Progress in each area is monitored and tracked. "Cognos scorecarding is serving as the bridge between strategy and execution for better overall communications and alignment with organizational goals across the company," said Mark Lack, manager, Financial Planning and Analysis, Mueller Inc. "The end result is better decision-making and a more strategy-focused organization." Schneider National Inc. is a premier provider of transportation, logistics and related services. The company focuses on operational metrics as drivers, using Cognos scorecarding capabilities as its enterprise standard to measure and monitor the benefits of process redesign, overall process performance, and individual process performers. "We view financial metrics as 'outcomes' vs. key 'drivers' like operational metrics," said John Hasenzahl, Director of Knowledge Services and Data Management at Schneider National. "Using Cognos to establish strategy maps with associated strategic objectives and metrics to measure progress, we have increased the sophistication of our decision-making and feedback processes, with a renewed emphasis on delivering analytic information and using BI products to promote improved process performance." The new scorecarding capabilities in Cognos 8 BI will provide unique features for customers that include personalized views; live reports, analysis and other information in context within the scorecard; impact analysis extending beyond simple cause and effect; advanced initiative tracking for projects and actions; and a strategy map design center so customers can create strategy maps and diagrams quickly without having to turn to a separate product or third-party tool. Since mid-2003 Cognos has been using its own BSC-certified scorecarding software alongside the company's reporting, planning, and forecasting capabilities to help drive its own performance. In 2004, Cognos was the first technology vendor to be named to the Balanced Scorecard Collaborative's Hall of Fame for breakthrough performance results. "Like ourselves, Cognos scorecarding customers have implemented a proven strategy management solution that has helped them define a series of interconnected performance indicators for a snap-shot view of how they are tracking against goals," said David Laverty, senior vice-president, Global Marketing. "With an up-to-date scorecard in place, they can eliminate inconsistent, manual processes and instead focus on critical business issues."