Cognos highlights ReportNet value at strategic briefing

At a recent event held at the Michaelangelo Hotel in Sandton, Cognos SA gave clients a closer look at how Cognos ReportNet can benefit employees throughout a company, and how it has enabled global supply chain specialist, UTi Worldwide, to deliver information and business value to its customers.

Cognos ReportNet is a fully Web-based enterprise reporting solution that provides organisations with one reporting system to produce production reports such as invoices and statements, statutory reports and business reports.

"At every level and in all departments in an organisation, business is driven by information," says Johan Cloete, director of business development at Cognos. "Before ReportNet, organisations used applications that merely included reporting functions of some kind, but that did not make access to business information easy or did not allow the information to be assimilated into meaningful forms."

ReportNet provides organisations with all the tools necessary to satisfy their reporting requirements in one out-of-the-box solution that has built-in capabilities to simplify departmental reporting and complex global reporting.

The solution`s multilingual capabilities allow organisations to build reports once and then share these reports across many languages without the need for additional translation of formatting.

"ReportNet moves reporting closer to the needs of everyday users and away from users needing to understand database logic and computing languages to create and work with reports," Cloete says. "Simplifying report creation and modification for professional and business authors extends authoring to a broader audience and significantly decreases demands for report creation and modification on IT."

UTi Worldwide implemented Cognos ReportNet as the basis for extending the functionality of its offering and adding value to its customers. UTi has global licences for the Cognos Enterprise Business Intelligence (EBI) Series and ReportNet.

Presenting at the Cognos event, Walter Mapham, UTi director of strategic services, spoke of how his company has seen the global supply chain market evolve, moving away from an operational focus to concentrate on tactical and strategic issues. As such, supply chain management transactional systems must now also be able to undertake performance management, cost trending and the identification of specific management actions.

"The depth of analysis that ReportNet is capable of has enabled us to provide our customers with supply chain data that is essential to the respective businesses," Mapham says. "With ReportNet, key information can be delivered in an instantly publishable format, and critical actions can be identified and acted upon far faster and with fewer overheads than ever before."