Business intelligence (BI) company, Cognos, has launched Cognos Metrics Manager, its new scorecarding solution that enables organisations to actively monitor, analyse and report at every level of the business. Cognos Metrics Manager will be available locally from mid-November.
Cognos Metrics Manager is the latest example of the company`s corporate performance management (CPM) vision in action - delivering software that allows enterprise companies to measure execution against business strategy.
"This breakthrough performance solution adds the dimension of management to business metrics," says Tharina van der Merwe, communications manager at Cognos SA. "Global 2000 organisations today have been forced to report critical budgeting, forecasting plans and actuals using spreadsheets and presentations, which is largely a manual and non-integrated process.
"Using Cognos Metrics Manager, businesses can now focus on performance by linking execution and accountability to goals," she adds. "For these companies, Cognos Metrics Manager enables self-sufficiency, allowing individuals to access metrics that are directly linked to the corporate strategy and to prioritise accordingly."
She says as part of the Cognos Series 7 BI solution, Cognos Metrics Manager gives decision-makers a rich environment to exploit the extensive range of Cognos Series 7 functionality including visualisations, reports and analysis.
"This integration enables a truly collaborative decision-making environment for business users, allowing them to easily share and distribute information tied to key performance indicators. The decision-making flow moves cleanly from `what` is happening to `why` it is happening." "Balanced scorecard implementations often fail because the underlying business intelligence is missing," says Frank Buytendijk, research director at Gartner. "Tightly integrated BI is critical to the success of any scorecard initiative because without it questions of whether the scorecard metric on or off track can not be asked. Business intelligence tools allow users to drill down and find the detail behind the questions."
"The need for greater visibility into business performance is critical for companies today," says Henry Morris, vice president of Applications and Information Access at IDC. "With Metrics Manager, Cognos adds highly visual, cross-functional performance management to its portfolio of business intelligence tools and analytic applications. This should be welcome news for Cognos` customers and business partners."
"Staying on top of the factors that drive our business is critical in this tumultuous economic environment," says Harry Hixson, CTX Mortgage Company senior vice president of information technology. "Cognos Metrics Manager is easy to use and powerful enough to provide the scorecarding solution we need to manage business performance across our company."
Cognos Metrics Manager`s `open methodology` approach ensures customers can implement any of a number of quality/performance initiatives including Six Sigma, balanced scorecard, ISO 9000, EFQM and total quality management (TQM), and manage these performance methodologies with Cognos solutions. It also provides out-of-the-box implementation and features simple, intuitive user interfaces making it easy for employees at all levels of an organisation to learn and use.
"Executives and managers worldwide are already using Cognos BI to better monitor and manage enterprise performance," says Van der Merwe. "Companies from healthcare, financial services, the public sector, and manufacturing are using Cognos dashboarding and scorecarding solutions to link individual execution with overall business strategy across the enterprise, fulfilling a critical element of effective CPM.
"Cognos was the first BI vendor to articulate a vision for the strategic application of business intelligence. Its leadership position in the scorecarding market today shows that we have a solid and successful track record. The introduction of Cognos Metrics Manager will only extend that lead. Delivering solutions that help organisations align business strategy with execution across the enterprise continues to be our mandate," she concludes.
Share
Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence (BI), delivers software that helps companies improve business performance by enabling effective decision-making at all levels of the organisation. A forerunner in defining the BI software category, Cognos delivers the next level of competitive advantage corporate performance management (CPM) achieved through the strategic application of BI on an enterprise scale.
CPM lets organisations measure execution against business strategy to ensure the two are aligned at all levels across the enterprise. Cognos provides a framework for CPM that links people, information, and decision-making processes throughout the organisation, and enables the complete management cycle with integrated software for planning, budgeting, reporting, analysis, and scorecarding.
Cognos` framework for CPM includes:
* Cognos Series 7, which provides an enterprise-scale BI framework supporting a full suite of BI tools that deliver query and reporting, analysis, scorecarding, visualization, and event detection capabilities.
* A common CPM data foundation model that encapsulates business best practices, integrates a company`s business performance measures, and leverages enterprise data sources.
* Enterprise analytic applications that deliver out-of-the-box, predefined, integrated reporting and analysis across major business functions.
* Cognos Finance, a strategic enterprise planning and budgeting application that supports the management cycle and enables finance professionals to manage all core financial processes within one environment.
Cognos serves more than 19 000 customers in over 120 countries. Cognos business intelligence solutions and services are also available from more than 3 000 worldwide partners and resellers. For more information, visit the Cognos Web site at http://www.cognos.com.
Editorial contacts