BI contract in the can for IBM

Peter Dinham
Thursday, 20 August 2009 13:11

IT Industry - Deals

IBM has won a contract with packaged foods company, JR Simplot, to deploy its new Cognos 8 enterprise business intelligence tool in its Australian operation in conjunction with Simplot’s new ERP system.

Simplot, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the US-based JR Simplot Company, has purchased a 600-user license for the software and will begin development next month.

Simplot Australia CIO – Business Transformation,  Martin Nowak-Rowe, CIO said today that initially, IBM Cognos 8 BI will be used to consolidate and enhance the company’s financial management reporting, providing a single view of data drawn from the company's demand management and ERP applications.

“Following this the solution will be extended to all areas of the business including manufacturing, sales and operations, human resources and payroll.

“We will be using the ERP system for reporting on the operational and transactional aspects of our business but when it comes to high level decision making or identifying and analysing trends we need BI.  We selected IBM because it is robust and a significant player in the market. We see it as an investment for the long term.”

 According to Nowak-Rowe, a major factor in the decision was the IBM Cognos financial performance analytics module with its series of pre-built adaptable reports for transactional system data, and he said the reports will help to reduce development time and costs, with a faster time-to-value.
 
“The ready availability of suitable BI skills – both among consultants and prospective employees – was an important consideration as were software independence and ease of integration. Simplot wanted a solution that would easily integrate with a variety of applications and stipulated that it had to be independent of any existing systems already in use at the company. 

Nowak-Rowe also said that “this long-term project is all about decision making and using information. It's about people not spending their time collating and formatting data but rather having them analyse information so that they can obtain value from it. We expect that IBM Cognos 8 BI will assist us by combining all the different types of data within our business and making it possible for us to identify process and planning efficiencies.”