Over the past decade, MarineMax has experienced tremendous growth. Today, the company can be found in 55 locations across the United States, with a multi-channel retail model that includes showrooms, catalogs, a call center and a full-service online presence. With this expansion came the need for stronger, more collaborative information management across the enterprise. Previously, critical data was trapped in many disparate spreadsheets and systems, making it very difficult for business leaders and frontline employees to access and share information on sales, costs and inventory.

With IBM business analytics software in place, MarineMax has benefited from significant operational efficiencies across all levels of the company. Store managers now capitalize on self-service reporting and faster access to their store performance, helping them make better decisions about their merchandising and promotions. Finance is able to enforce a more consistent company-wide budgeting process to ensure forecast accuracy, and can focus on long-term planning and strategic performance analysis. Additionally, senior executives gain a holistic, real-time view of historical, current and projected enterprise performance to ensure company objectives are always on target.

A more efficient budgeting, forecasting and analysis process was, in fact, the primary driver for the new IBM system. Prior solutions were unstable and lacked key functionality such as re-forecasting, and “what if” scenario modeling to determine the impact of business decisions. With IBM, operational units across MarineMax can now easily work together from the same numbers to build integrated budgets and plans – a process that today only takes weeks instead of months – and evaluate performance against plans.

These new-found forecasting efficiencies were especially critical in the area of demand planning. Generally, global retailers experience lead times as long as 6 to 10 months, forcing them to make substantial bets on inventory, consumer trends and economic conditions. This challenge is magnified in the world of retail boating, where inaccurate commitment planning of luxury boats can inflate inventory costs. Using IBM business analytics, MarineMax can tap into multiple years of sales history, enabling managers to better understand customer demand trends and more confidently establish future commitments, adjusting forecasts throughout the year based on sales activities.

Similar efficiencies have been experienced in the Marketing department. MarineMax participates in hundreds of key marketing and sales events every year, such as boat shows, which require considerable labor and material resources to run effectively. IBM analytics provides marketing executives stronger visibility into the true cost and return on investment of each event. By easily identifying top and bottom performing events, MarineMax can focus efforts only on those events that drive greater returns, and has reduced their annual marketing costs significantly while still maintaining industry leading market share.

IBM also underpins the company’s Management By Objectives (MBO) program for employee performance, which helps employees clearly understand corporate objectives and identify their individual or team responsibilities. Using IBM technology, store managers can establish individual goals, monitor team member performance, take corrective measures when necessary, then roll information up to the store, region and company levels to quickly determine the impact on payroll.

“IBM business analytics and performance management is helping us achieve a smarter and more efficient operational model,” said Jeremy Wilson, Vice President of Information Technology at MarineMax. “The company is now better able to strengthen collaboration between finance, human resources, marketing, and store operations, ensuring MarineMax remains agile in responding to market challenges, capitalizing on new opportunities and providing the best shopping experience for our customers.”

In the retail world, success is premised on building customer loyalty and trust by getting the right product into the hands of the consumer at the right time. Yet every year, the retail industry loses $93 billion in missed sales due to not having the right products in stock.

“IBM analytics helps chains like Marine Max eliminate inefficiency and align supply with demand, putting them in a stronger position to better serve the new breed of empowered consumer,” said Patricia Vekich Waldron, worldwide distribution sector executive at IBM.

This effort with MarineMax reflects IBM’s focus on helping retailers use their information as a strategic asset. IBM recently created a new Business Analytics & Optimization services organization, with 4,000 consultants who can help clients get up and running with deep analytics capabilities, and made significant acquisitions in the analytics space such as the recent $1.2 billion acquisition of SPSS and the $4.9 billion purchase of Cognos in 2008.

MarineMax’s analytics and performance management system includes IBM Cognos BI and IBM Cognos Planning, IBM Infosphere Master Data Management Server, IBM Websphere Commerce and IBM Websphere DataStage.

Nestlé has already deployed SAP Business Warehouse as its global standard for data warehousing and analytical reporting. The company will use Cognos 8 BI to complement the SAP Business Warehouse front end to give power users the ability to handle ad hoc reporting and grouping of data. It also provides the ability to merge external data from any source with data from SAP Business Warehouse, push pre-formatted and easily printable reports to end users, and adapt reports in line with different user needs.

The decision to use Cognos was made after a thorough competitive evaluation. Nestlé selected Cognos 8 BI because of its tight integration with SAP Business Warehouse, ability to empower end users through self-service reporting, simplified administration, and robust report distribution capabilities.

“Nestlé operates in a fast-moving sector where time to market and the ability to analyse products and performance by country, team or brand is critical,” said Dave Laverty, CMO and senior vice-president of marketing at Cognos. “Giving staff access to the Cognos 8 BI reporting solution will help them better monitor, analyse and track performance so they can make decisions that directly influence the overall success of the business. Cognos 8 BI is flexible enough to meet the diverse information needs of the many communities within the Nestlé group.”

Cognos 8 Business Intelligence provides decision makers at all levels in the enterprise with a range of capabilities to better manage performance by delivering a consistent, accurate view of all business information. Powered by SAP NetWeaver, Cognos 8 BI easily integrates into existing infrastructures with multiple systems and data sources. It simplifies the Business Intelligence environment, improves user adoption, enables better decision-making and provides a robust foundation for enterprise Business Intelligence and performance management.

As MassHousing’s EIS has matured, so have the requests and needs of its 300-plus users who require more reports, increased customization, enhanced security, and better visibility into the agency to better manage the business. In addition, new departments such as human resources and compliance and diversity have requested access to Cognos reports to meet regulatory requirements. To continue to meet these evolving demands, MassHousing has migrated to Cognos 8 BI. The agency created an internal portal referred to as “My MassHousing” that provides access to agency news, timesheets, and the Cognos 8 BI solutions, including budget information and trend reports. With the portal, users see the relevant information they need to drive their organization’s performance at the start of, and throughout, every day.

In addition, Cognos’ consulting and training services have helped MassHousing build its BI Competency Center (BICC), a dedicated team of six people in its Business Intelligence and Corporate Reporting department officially designated in 2006 and separate from the traditional IT department. The MassHousing BICC is tasked with making sure that both existing and new systems do not affect the overall reporting needs of the agency

“Cognos is the lifeblood of our agency, and we continue to evolve our business practices with Cognos business intelligence,” said Carl Richardson, BI project manager at MassHousing. “As executives’ needs continue to grow, they’re pushing us to implement smarter and more efficient Cognos solutions rather than the other way around. This has helped us become a leader among our peers, as managers from other agencies ask to see what we’re doing with Cognos. By taking our implementation to the next level, we can meet the specific needs of our individual end users and at the same time, get a complete picture of our overall performance. This is priceless.”

“MassHousing is a shining example of a performance management implementation that started with departmental functionality and has since expanded to encompass a broad set of users across several functions and levels within the organization,” said Terence Atkinson, director of government and education solutions at Cognos. “As a result, the organization can gain increased efficiencies of business reporting and a unified picture of the overall business, and yet deliver a highly customized experience to meet the unique needs of its diverse users.”

In conjunction with the Jenzabar family of administrative solutions, Cognos 8 BI will deliver a complete range of BI capabilities to Jenzabar clients: reporting, analysis, scorecarding, dashboards, and business event management as well as data integration on a single, proven architecture. The solution will also deliver powerful search functionality for both BI and Enterprise Search. Cognos 8 BI offers schools a simplified BI environment that improves user adoption, enables better decision-making, and serves as an enterprise-scale foundation for performance management.

Cognos 8 BI is available now through Jenzabar to both new and existing customers. By engaging Jenzabar technical services, the new Cognos solution can be seamlessly integrated, deployed, and used within an institution’s Jenzabar system.

“We are very pleased to be expanding our long-term relationship with Cognos,” said Robert Maginn, Chairman and CEO of Jenzabar. “BI reporting is critical for campus executives and administrators. This solution will give those executives very important intelligence that is easily accessible. It will enable better decisions and drive our client institutions toward even greater success.”

“This offering provides our customers with a dramatically richer and productive client-facing campus-wide reporting and analysis framework,” added James Lastowski, Jenzabar’s Product Manager for Reporting Strategy. “Schools will have very easy access to the transactional data that exists in their ERP systems, and they will have a reporting environment that is very simple and efficient. With Cognos 8 BI, a reporting environment that once needed 400 reports to supply the necessary information to decision-makers might only need 80 reports to supply that same intelligence.”

The self-service nature of the new capability will make it easy for business analysts, financial analysts or line of business managers to interactively explore and analyze multidimensional information within Microsoft Excel, without draining valuable IT resources. Using formula-based data access, business users will be able to find answers, solve business problems and report key results in the format most convenient to them, while leveraging the Cognos 8 BI infrastructure for data consistency, freshness and security. For richer analysis and formatting, or for broader enterprise distribution of reports, they can re-use the results of their exploration within other worksheets or Cognos 8 BI’s proven reporting and analysis capabilities.

“The ability to conduct drag and drop exploration and analysis of controlled BI data within Excel will really benefit the business analyst who wants to solve analytical problems in a familiar spreadsheet environment,” said Vivian Adashek, financial systems project specialist, Manpower. “These analysts are gaining direct access to the underlying data sources within Excel so they can flexibly analyze trusted secure information from Cognos 8 BI together with other data sources without requiring IT to do this for them. As always, Cognos is listening and partnering with its customers on new product innovations.”

With Cognos 8 BI Analysis for Microsoft Excel, business users will have access to the entire Cognos 8 BI data layer. This provides a connection to heterogeneous data sources, including planning and consolidation. They will also gain a managed view of data through a single interface to explore, select, filter and define the layout of the desired information. Flexible query capabilities let business users refresh and modify their original analysis, alter the layout, express information as formulas and manage the query parameters. As the Cognos 8 BI data refreshes, or the query expands through drill-down, linked Excel calculations and charts are updated automatically.

“In IDC’s Services and Software Leading Indicators survey, C-suite executives expressed their desire for improved integrated access to relevant information as well as real-time monitoring of business performance,” said Kathleen Wilhide, Research Director, Financial Performance & Strategy Management, IDC. “Business analysts are faced with multiple daily requests for on-the-fly analysis. Through the use of Excel connected to the trusted Cognos performance management environment, analysts are empowered to produce self-service reports and analysis with familiar Excel, while maintaining the integrity of information through a live connection to the enterprise system of record.”

Cognos 8 BI Analysis for Microsoft Excel will extend Cognos’ support for Microsoft Office from consumption of pre-authored content within Office to report authoring, exploration and analysis. It joins solutions already in place for Cognos Controller, Cognos Planning, and Cognos 8 BI. By reaching business users that may prefer to work in spreadsheets, it will enable organizations to standardize on a single, trusted BI platform for all its users. Standardization on Cognos lets IT fully leverage the single security framework and proven web services-based architecture of Cognos 8 BI, while business users across the enterprise benefit from a direct connection to the same trusted performance information whether they are working from a spreadsheet, mobile device or a browser-based capability.

“Cognos is committed to supporting the BI needs of all users across organizations, regardless of their preferred, or required, authoring environments. Business analysts that are power Excel users may prefer to manipulate data for reporting and analysis within Excel, but their current method of cutting and pasting or manually entering information is fraught with security risk and data latency issues. Like all users in the organization, they will benefit from access to centrally trusted and controlled performance information,” said Leah MacMillan, vice president of product marketing, Cognos. “This solution will immediately extend the value of a customer’s Cognos 8 BI deployment, and unlike other tools available, it is not limited to exploration of proprietary data sources and does not require IT expertise to enjoy its benefits.”

Cognos 8 BI Analysis for Microsoft Excel is targeted to be available in the second half of 2007. It will be initially previewed at Cognos Finance Forum 2007, which spans North America and Europe with additional venues in Latin America and Asia Pacific.

Achmea, the largest insurance group in the Dutch market, employs 22,000 people working in six departments: Care, Pensions, Social Security, Direct Distribution, Monetary Distribution and Intermediary Distribution, and Group IT Services. Each division has its own key activities and operates under several brands. Cognos will be implemented across the enterprise to support business-critical and strategic goals, including financial and business scenario-based planning.

With Cognos 8 BI, Achmea will have a single product that easily integrates into its existing infrastructure, which has multiple systems and data sources. After Cognos successfully implemented two performance management projects for the Social Security Division in 2006, Achmea decided to implement Cognos across its enterprise. The Cognos consulting organization played a crucial role in the successful completion of the projects by aligning Achmea’s strategic objectives with the Cognos 8 BI implementation.

“We use integrated business performance management to monitor the strategy execution,” said Miloje Stevanovic, Manager of Change Management and IT at Achmea. “Cognos 8 BI provides us with a very solid base and a strong information platform.”

Achmea now has the complete range of BI capabilities from analysis, scorecarding, and reporting, on a single, proven architecture. In addition to delivering a single point of entry for business managers to access information, Cognos 8 BI will simplify deployment and administration for the IT department and reduce programming time. Cognos 8 BI is a groundbreaking product that provides decision makers at all levels of the enterprise with a consistent, accurate view of information to better manage performance. As a single product that easily integrates into existing infrastructures with multiple systems and data sources, Cognos 8 BI is a robust technology foundation for BI standardization and performance management.

“More and more companies realize that they aren’t able to increase their efficiency with their operational systems,” said Laurence Trigwell, senior director of financial services solutions at Cognos. “Strategic information is what matters. Achmea’s standardization is demonstrative of our vision of BI and performance management working together across the enterprise for all decision makers. Achmea now has a consistent, accurate view of information to better manage its performance.”

Achmea is the largest insurance group on the Dutch market. Achmea operates under brands such as Interpolis, Centraal Beheer Achmea, Zilveren Kruis Achmea, Avéro Achmea and FBTO. The common ambition of all insurers and service providers in Achmea is to take care of their clients’ cares. Central questions in this matter are safety, health, pension, workforce participation, company continuity and conditions of employment.

Commissioned by Cognos, the paper was written by renowned data visualization expert and educator Stephen Few and published by the Cognos Innovation Center for Performance Managementâ„¢. The paper follows the previous releases of two papers, Visual Communication: Core Principles for Displaying Quantitative Information, and Visual Pattern Recognition: Meaningful Patterns in Quantitative Business Information, both by Few.

Stephen Few is Principal of the consultancy Perceptual Edge and the author of two books: Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten and Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data.

Explores link between data visualization and business intelligence

The paper also explores the academic interest in data visualization and its influence on best practices in real-world applications. “Dashboards, visual analytics, and even simple graphs will continue to develop and conform to best practices,” writes Few.

Also explored are future directions for data visualization, such as its increasingly important role within business intelligence. “Data visualization is well-equipped to assume a central role in business intelligence, for it is intelligence that it is tailored to foster,” writes Few.

Helping to build best-practice business cultures

The Cognos Innovation Center was established in June 2004 to advance the understanding of proven performance management best-practices and enabling technologies. In June, 2006, it expanded its focus to advance BI competency for the strategic application of business intelligence on an enterprise scale.

“Business Intelligence Competency Centers (BICCs) act as enablers and catalysts for the creation of best-practice cultures,” said Michael Dziekan, Cognos Global Program Director, Business Intelligence Competency Centers. “The knowledge and practical guidance provided in these white papers will provide a great start to organizations building an inventory of best practices that drive operational efficiency.”

More value from business intelligence deployments

Business intelligence deployments are most successful when they meet a specific business need. By following the principles in these papers, business intelligence professionals will be better able to design reports that communicate more clearly and effectively, thereby increasing the relevance of the content to the user, and the business value of the entire deployment.

Available immediately

The Paper is available for immediate download from the Cognos Innovation Center for Performance Managementâ„¢.

About the Cognos Innovation Center for Performance Management

Staffed by experts in planning, management processes, and technology, the Innovation Center partners with more than 500 Cognos customers, academics, partners, industry leaders, and others who want to accelerate adoption, reduce risk, and maximize the impact of technology-enabled performance management practices. Depending on their area of interest, members focus on advancing performance management practices or business intelligence competency, gaining insights from experts and peers who have experienced similar challenges and paths to success.

Building upon IBM’s enhanced version of the DB2 Warehouse and based on the DB2 9 Viper data server, the initiative includes new IBM Balanced Warehouse packages, which are pre-configured combinations of software, hardware and storage technologies optimized to meet a wide range of dynamic warehousing requirements.

“Cognos has been deeply involved in many major innovations with IBM in recent years. IBM’s latest initiative is a positive step forward to helping organizations transform their static data into competitive assets, enabling customers in all industries to make better, faster decisions by delivering increased business insight to the right people at the right time,” said Rupert Bonham-Carter, associate vice-president of global strategic alliances at Cognos. “IBM’s commitment to driving greater efficiencies on the back-end – including with ever-complex data warehousing models – ultimately translates into significant value on the front-end for our customers, which is deserving of our support and ongoing collaboration.”

“IBM is working with its key strategic partners to bring to market a Dynamic Warehousing initiative that promises to help our joint customers streamline business processes, transform customer service and generate new revenue opportunities,” said Karen Parrish, vice president of business intelligence solutions for IBM. “By continuing to work closely with Cognos, we look forward to enabling our customers to add unmatched BI capabilities on top of integrated information so they can drive innovation, increase operational efficiency, and lower IT risk.”

Cognos and IBM have a proven history over the past decade in delivering cost effective, integrated business solutions for global enterprises. Most recently, Cognos and IBM extended its global strategic alliance to help customers integrate their business processes across the enterprise and gain greater insight into business performance. The alliance agreement included joint development, marketing, and sales of SOA-based solutions to help customers optimize their analytics capabilities leveraging industry-specific best practices.

To date, the two companies have worked together on a number of successful technology and business solution initiatives, including:

• Delivering Unstructured Information Management Architecture (UIMA) as a standard framework for search and text analysis of unstructured information
• Bringing to market a number of industry-specific joint solutions for banking and public safety, including the highly-acclaimed IBM Crime Information Warehouse
• Bundling Cognos 8 Workforce Performance a s a standard analytic and reporting solution within IBM’s full-service Human Capital Management (HCM) outsourcing solutions portfolio, in order to help global customers address the impending skills gap and graying workforce

Cognos and IBM also continue to work together to deepen product and platform interoperability. Most recently, Cognos announced support for IBM Information Server, which allows customers to extend the reach of Cognos 8 BI in order to unlock strategic information across complex and heterogeneous environments.

The first securities exchange in the U.S., and founded in 1790, the PHLX has a strong tradition of innovation and continues to respond to the ever-changing needs of the investment community. The company was looking for a more comprehensive reporting system to allow it to better manage membership data. Prior to using Cognos software, the PHLX had data stored in separate remote groups. After a competitive review, the PHLX chose Cognos 8 BI as its standard reporting system to gain one unified and interactive view of information from its diverse set of management applications and isolated data silos. Cognos 8 BI will enable prompted and ad-hoc reporting to help centralize diverse and redundant applications, as well as ensure reliable information sharing.

With a central reporting system and a common front end, employees will be able to select from a list of commonly used reports or create ad hoc reports to get answers to questions and find new information. The PHLX will use IBM’s WebSphere portal as the interface and access point for Cognos 8 BI. The software’s ease of use will enable all Exchange employees to use Cognos 8 BI to view membership data, keep track of new and old account information, and gain information about new products, options, equities, real-time trade report data, and clearing and exchange billing. In addition, Cognos 8 BI will automatically deliver daily, monthly and quarterly reports on billing and trading activities. These reporting activities will provide employees with easier access to information they need to make better business decisions.

“With the legacy mainframe and data islands, we could only view data in isolated chunks,” said Doug Schafer, first vice president of derivatives trading systems development and back office redesign, the Philadelphia Stock
Exchange. “Standardizing on Cognos 8 BI provides us with a better look at the company in order to deliver critical business insights and drive improved decision-making. While it is a more comprehensive system, it is still easy for
our non-technical employees to use regularly.”

Cognos 8 BI is a groundbreaking product that provides decision makers at all levels of the enterprise with a consistent, accurate view of information to better manage performance. As a single product that easily integrates into the PHLX’s existing AIX and DB2 infrastructures, with multiple systems and data sources, Cognos 8 BI is a robust technology foundation for BI standardization and performance management.

“The Philadelphia Stock Exchange’s standardization on Cognos 8 BI is demonstrative of our competitive edge in the business intelligence market, and the financial services industry,” said Laurence Trigwell, senior financial services industry director, Cognos. “Our enterprise-wide solution is the only solution on a single Web services architecture that will help businesses gain better insights for their organization by putting the information into the hands of decision makers. The Philadelphia Stock Exchange now has an easy to use, reliable system with flexible report generation and quality data integrity.”

Cognos is a recognized leader in delivering performance management solutions for the financial services industry. More than 1,000 financial services institutions worldwide use Cognos, including nine of the top 10 banks in Europe and all of the top 10 banks in the United States. Customers include Regions Financial, Bank of Ireland, First Citizens Bank and SWIFT, the financial industry-owned co-operative servicing over 7,800 financial institutions in more than 200 countries.

Information on over 24,000 students and 6,000 staff from the University’s student, finance, HR and payroll, research management and admissions systems needed to be combined in fewer reports for staff to analyse more easily. Whether admissions handling, student fee payments, funding or students’ progression year on year, university staff can now see a single version of all this information at a glance. They are able to draw out trends to help with better decision-making for improved performance.

The University of Sheffield decided to tender for a new BI and ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Load function) solution to analyse reports on each individual aspect of the University.

As part of a product evaluation, the University looked at offerings from leading vendors, and selected Cognos 8 BI for its ease-of-use and single architecture for integration of all data. This included the Cognos Data Manager ETL function, which unites disparate data and automatically delivers the information to users, in real-time distribution.

“A drive to revamp our IT meant that we needed a faster and more efficient way of dealing with the amount of data being collated,” said Roddy Flynn, Data Administrator at the University of Sheffield. “Having worked with Cognos previously, we knew we could rely on the technology, and the upgrade to Cognos 8 BI meant we were able to standardize on one robust platform for all data, rather than bundles of multiple technologies and architectures that the other providers offered.”

“With all information in a central place, we now have one set of data to work with,” continued Flynn. “Redundant reports have been identified, enabling us to cut down on the number of reports created from 1,800 to 1,000. The quality of our information has improved, as staff can focus their efforts on analysing the data for best performance to spot trends between each department, instead of spending additional time gathering the information.”

“Using Cognos 8 BI across the organisation will provide faster reporting and higher level analysis of critical information for the University,” said Graham Walter, vice-president of Cognos UK, Middle East and South Africa. “The technology will pull together all relevant information for better visibility across the University in a faster and more efficient manner, to provide better service to both the students, as well as the staff.”