Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today announced that B&H Photo Video (B&H), one of the world’s leading retailers of imaging products, has selected Cognos as its enterprise-wide performance management system standard.B&H has been using Cognos to complete sales reporting, product movement management and inventory analysis for their on-line and retail operations. B&H wanted to better understand and service its customers by analyzing shopping patterns and purchasing trends.
By standardizing on a single BI platform and upgrading to Cognos 8 BI, decision-makers throughout the organization – from executives to finance, supply chain and operations managers – will be able to capitalize on the complete range of reporting, analysis, dashboarding and scorecarding functionality to optimize inventory, increase customer loyalty and improve the overall customer shopping experience, regardless of channel.
B&H also licensed Cognos 8 Planning for financial planning and measuring performance against plans. In addition, B&H will integrate Cognos Performance Applications with its custom-developed ERP system, enabling the organization to get a jump start on enterprise-wide reporting for standard operational areas, such as general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable and procurement.
“It was important for us to bring in a full performance management suite at B&H because we pride ourselves on being a service-oriented organization,†said Moses Blum, director of IT business support, B&H Photo Video. “With Cognos, we will be able to improve the shopping experience of our customers, both consumers and professionals, regardless of whether they made their purchase on-line, by fax, by phone, or in our flagship store in New York. Performance management at B&H will allow us to continue to be the leader in our market.â€
Cognos Business Intelligence, Cognos Planning and Cognos Performance Applications are key components within the Cognos Performance Management System, which aligns technology, best practices and a partner ecosystem to enable organizational agility and improve the decision-making process for organizations by connecting people and goals across operations and management functions with right-time, actionable information.
“Cognos helps deliver improved store and channel performance, increased profit margins and more effective operational cost management to leading global retailers such as B&H Photo Video,†said Patricia Vekich Waldron, retail industry director at Cognos. “With a full performance management solution, B&H will be able to increase visibility, accountability and profitability across the enterprise. It will also be able to leverage critical business data in order to plan and analyze operations, determine changing market demands, and collaborate with suppliers to ultimately drive higher customer satisfaction.â€