Denver Water Implements Cognos Series 7 for Financial Reporting and Analysis

Jan. 10, 2003
Cognos Helps Reduce Report Creation Time From Days to Minutes

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. 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."

Source: PRNewswire