02/14/2005

Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN) a provider of business intelligence (BI) and corporate performance management (CPM), and BearingPoint, Inc. (NYSE: BE), a consulting firm, today announced that Labatt Breweries of Canada is complementing its 150 year tradition of brewing excellence with an industry-leading CPM solution from Cognos and BearingPoint.

Labatt said they selected BearingPoint with Cognos as a subcontractor to combine Cognos BI and enterprise planning tools to help improve workforce efficiency, control and planning at all levels, deliver more targeted and efficient performance management, enable faster, profit-based decision making, and identify new business opportunities, distribution gaps or sales trend changes in real-time.

A release said Labatt has deployed the Cognos CPM solution as an integrated business performance foundation to effectively link internal transaction systems, external and internal data sources, and reporting/analysis tools for improved accountability, predictability, and visibility across its business in Canada.

The commpany said the initial challenge was to develop a consistent framework worldwide for all data, processes and technology. Labatt's IT environment consisted of 11 different systems and 74 different transaction sets with 25 different dimensions. Internal data flowed from different human resource, ERP and CRM systems. Market research and retail consumption reports from external organizations like The Beer Store provided a steady stream of data points to manage and analyze.

"By working with Cognos and BearingPoint, we have integrated our performance monitoring and planning environments nationally across regions and functions for one common view of all data -- a single source of the truth," said Lorrie Owen-Turner, Director of EBI, Labatt Breweries of Canada. "Implementing the Cognos CPM solution has provided us with an opportunity to move to a model that is focused on driving performance, profitability and proactively managing our business in real-time as opposed to continually gathering and seeking less up-to-date information from disparate systems and spreadsheets."

"The implementation and deployment of this initiative at Labatt demonstrates how companies can improve overall business performance," said Jeff Bowman, managing director, BearingPoint's Middle Market Consulting Group. "Together, Cognos and BearingPoint created a solution set that allows Labatt to focus on sales, marketing and finance activities and can lead to increased customer profitability."

"Performance management is a business imperative and a key best-practice that illustrates excellence in corporate governance in today's regulated, compliance-focused environment," said Ben Plummer, vice-president, Global Partner Development, Cognos Inc. "Cognos, as a BearingPoint alliance partner, joins two recognized leaders in the performance management space to combine the domain and technical expertise required to architect and jointly deliver a complete CPM solution for Labatt. Labatt now has the right solution set for consistently optimizing decisions, addressing business challenges and proactively impacting future performance across the organization."

Cognos' CPM solution is comprised of: Cognos Enterprise BI Series, one of the industry's most comprehensive business intelligence solutions; Cognos Planning and Consolidation solutions, industry-leading software for planning, budgeting, modeling, forecasting and financial consolidation; and Cognos Metrics Manager, one of the most robust and flexible enterprise scorecarding solutions.