BURLINGTON, Mass., Jan. 8, 2003 -- Denver Water, a City and County of Denver owned public utility that supplies water to approximately 1 million people in the City and surrounding areas, has implemented a business intelligence (BI) solution from Cognos, a provider of BI, which includes key components of the Cognos Series 7 framework.
The Cognos solution helps provide finance managers and board officials access to mission-critical financial data. It has also helped Denver Water cut the time to produce complex budget reports from several days to just a few minutes
Finance managers use Cognos BI to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) and run sophisticated analysis on budgets and long-term financial forecasts. Cognos Series 7 enables Denver Water to report and analyze data stored in its Oracle data warehouse.
"We are currently 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," said Ron Duncan, manager of fiscal planning and performance, Denver Water. "This level of analysis allows us to more easily spot inconsistencies in our data and ensures we are working with updated and accurate financial information."
Prior to 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," added Duncan.
"Public sector organizations are under increasing pressure to increase operational efficiencies as well as fiscal responsibility and accountability to key stakeholders," said Dave Laverty, senior vice president, global marketing, Cognos. "Cognos Series 7 provides the most secure and scalable Web- based BI framework, designed to meet our customer's complex information needs and drive process improvements and cost savings throughout the organization."
About Denver Water:
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 one million people, more than a quarter of the state's population. It uses less than two percent of the average annual flow of Colorado's rivers and streams to do it. Denver Water maintains a reputation as one of the nation's finest systems due to the solid foundation provided by the framers of Denver's City Charter amendments. They created an autonomous, independent and non-political Board of Water Commissioners with the singular purpose of meeting the water supply needs of the residents of a community located on the Great American Desert.
About Cognos:
Cognos delivers software that helps companies improve business performance by enabling effective decision-making at all levels of the organization. A forerunner in defining the BI software category, Cognos delivers the next level of competitive advantage -- Corporate Performance Management (CPM) -- achieved through the strategic application of BI on an enterprise scale.
CPM lets organizations measure execution against business strategy to ensure the two are aligned at all levels across the enterprise. Cognos provides a framework for CPM that links people, information, and decision- making processes throughout the organization, and enables the complete management cycle with integrated software for planning, budgeting, reporting, analysis, and scorecarding.
Cognos serves more than 20,000 customers in over 135 countries. Cognos enterprise business intelligence solutions and services are also available from more than 3,000 worldwide partners and resellers. For more information, visit the Cognos Web site at http://www.cognos.com.
