New Cognos Performance Solution Helps Retailers Integrate Company-Wide Planning, Monitor Success

Published 15th January 2008

London UK, January 14, 2008 – Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, has announced the launch of a new performance solution designed to help retail executives and managers standardise and coordinate company-wide operational plans and track performance against objectives along the way...

“Retailers today struggle with departmental silos, particularly in finance, merchandising, operations and marketing. The lack of integration between top-down strategic plans and bottom-up operational plans makes it difficult for retailers to manage to a single set of corporate goals and performance objectives. Ultimately, this results in missed revenue and profitability targets, as well as jeopardising growth in market share and customer satisfaction,” said Brian Hume, president of Martec International, a leading consulting and training firm. “Building a solid, integrated retail planning process helps pave the way for higher sales, improved inventory turnover, fewer markdowns, and by extension, higher profits.”

The Cognos Retail Financial Workbench & Scorecard Blueprint provides a performance management framework – including planning, score carding, dash boarding and reporting – that enables retail executives to standardise the corporate-wide planning process, gain consensus between financial and operational plans, identify and monitor key metrics, and ensure all departments are working towards the same business goals. Continuing from Cognos’ suite of Retail Performance Blueprints – including solutions for improving store operations, increasing marketing effectiveness, and aligning merchandise planning with customer demand – the new Blueprint provides a mechanism for consolidating multiple operational plans into a single high-level financial plan, conducting ‘what-if’ analysis and scenario modelling, generating financial statements and monitoring key performance metrics through a pre-built scorecard and intuitive dashboards.

“Integrated planning across the chain drives performance,” said Jay Victory, director of financial planning and analysis at Tractor Supply Company, the largest retail farm and ranch store chain in the United States with 738 stores across 40 states. “Cognos Performance Blueprints offer finance managers a viable alternative to piecemeal spreadsheets, empowering them to drive business metrics that help optimise performance and contain costs, rather than spending countless cycles validating data, managing the process and manually consolidating plans. Cognos Performance Blueprints have helped Tractor Supply Company turn data into knowledge and accelerate the implementation of new automated processes.”