British Columbia Ferry buoyed by Cognos business intelligence

The British Columbia Ferry Corporation, which serves up to 46 ports of call on 25 routes throughout coastal British Columbia, has chosen a business intelligence solution from Cognos, provider of business intelligence solutions, to help it improve financial reporting and enhance customer service.

"Organisations like BC Ferries are lifelines to their communities. Depended upon every day, these organisations demand business intelligence solutions that can address their complex requirements to help them make better decisions fast. Cognos provides BC Ferries with a way to bridge the information gap and deliver sound business decisions in a mission-critical timeframe," says Alan Rottenberg, senior vice president, e-Business Applications Business Unit, Cognos.

BC Ferries had complex reporting and analysis challenges to tackle. Representing 40 vessels, 4 600 employees, servicing 46 destinations, and with hybrid set of financial systems and data stores, BC Ferries needed a business intelligence tool that could bridge all of these systems to create a unified, coherent financial picture.

Today, with Cognos PowerPlay and Cognos Impromptu, BC Ferries performs sophisticated analysis on financial information and drives that information into the hands of managers. Everyone with budget authority in the agency -- approximately 200 users - uses the Cognos solution to ensure they are mapping to key objectives.

"With Cognos, the decision-makers at BC Ferries have been empowered with information they simply would not have had previously. The financial reports in our old system took weeks to prepare and, in some cases, were delivered in stacks of paper literally meters high," says Jay Prill, director of information services, BC Ferries. "Today when we ask a question about our day-to-day business, we get an instant answer."

Information about operational costs, budgets and overall financial performance is now at the fingertips of decision makers. Executives can easily navigate through the data to look at any issue that might impact service, and address it immediately. Cognos has also given BC Ferries insight into traffic and customer service levels, allowing them to devise new ways to better serve the community.