Denver Water, a city and county of Denver-owned public utility that supplies water to 1 million people in the city and surrounding areas, has implemented a business intelligence (BI) solution from Cognos, the world leader in BI, which includes key components of the Cognos Series 7 framework.
The Cognos solution helps provide finance managers and board officials with access to financial data and has helped Denver Water cut the time to produce complex budget reports from several days to a few minutes.
Finance managers use Cognos BI to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) and run analysis on budgets and long-term financial forecasts. Cognos Series 7 enables Denver Water to report and analyse data stored in its Oracle data warehouse.
"We are using Cognos Series 7 to assist in developing the operation and maintenance component of our 10-year financial plan. With a decade of historical information at our fingertips, we are able to perform trend analysis quickly and easily - meaning we can better forecast over extended time periods," says Ron Duncan, manager of fiscal planning and performance, Denver Water. "This level of analysis allows us to spot inconsistencies in our data and ensures we are working with updated and accurate financial information."
Before deploying Cognos, Denver Water relied on manual processes to collect and aggregate data from various legacy systems and databases, which took up to a week.
"With Cognos we can perform much of this same process much more quickly, and create dynamic reports with that data for our managers and board. The time savings are substantial," adds Duncan.
"Public sector organisations are under increasing pressure to increase operational efficiencies and fiscal responsibility and accountability to key stakeholders," says Dave Laverty, senior vice-president, global marketing, Cognos. "Cognos Series 7 provides a solid, secure and scalable Web-based BI framework, to fulfil against these requirements."
Denver Water was established in 1918 by the people of Denver as an independent agency with duties and responsibilities specifically spelled out in the City Charter. Since that time, the Denver Board of Water Commissioners has supplied water to Denver and contract distributors adjacent to Denver.
Denver Water now has responsibility for serving more than 1 million people, more than a quarter of the state`s population. It uses less than 2% of the average annual flow of Colorado`s rivers and streams to do it.
Share