Clover goes with Cognos to ease reporting pains

Business intelligence company Cognos has implemented a solution at Clover, the largest dairy company in SA, as a vital part of its high-tech IT environment. The installation is aimed at consolidating its data and maximising production, promotion and product planning within the group.

With a turnover in excess of R2.3 billion and over 8 100 employees, Clover needed fast, simple and accurate access to information for users all over the country. "We needed a solution that could cope with changes and new requirements as fast as possible," says Martie Venter, systems manager at Clover SA. "Vast volumes of data needed to be transformed into meaningful information, speeding up the reporting development process. In addition, we wanted to get rid of paper, and put a stop to re-keying information into spreadsheets.

"By implementing Cognos PowerPlay, Impromptu and Enterprise, we had the following benefits," says Venter. "Central control was enforced that made managing the business intelligence boom a lot easier. The traffic on the WAN has changed from moving cubes between 10 different locations to only one, and the amount of cube groups has decreased into larger cubes that are accessible to all."

She adds that remote access performance is now as good as local access, with an almost undetectable difference. "Additionally, the PowerPlay/HTML reports enable Clover Intranet users to share corporate information, and end-users are empowered to do their own reports, no longer reliant on the IT department. This in turn allows them to answer ad hoc queries themselves as answers are available instantly."

Venter adds that by using Cognos products over several applications areas, namely forecasting, sales and financials, Clover has the benefit of most users understanding the tool and the concept of multi-dimensional views.

"Fast deployment of new cubes is enabled because of this, and the investment in training and licences are done only once. Another enormous benefit is its ability to combine different sources of information, such as DB400 and XCEL, and find out exactly how good or bad your data is."

"Cognos Impromptu is the enterprise answer for database query and reporting," adds Peter Gerson, MD of Cognos locally. "Organisations such as Clover can quickly and easily create complete reporting applications using the powerful authoring capabilities of a Windows client. They can then deploy these reports over the Web to any number of users inside the organisation.

"Cognos PowerPlay can then convey a inclusive business performance measurement reporting and analysis environment for enterprise applications. It offers users access to vital data to improve business performance and maximise production," he says.

"I never thought that PowerPlay would become a brand within the Clover company," concludes Venter. "My users do not ask for information, they ask for PowerPlay."