Manufacturing

 Manufacturing companies worldwide choose Cognos:

• 19 of the 20 largest CPG manufacturers use Cognos.
• 9 of the top 10 high tech manufacturing companies rely on Cognos.
• Cognos software and services have been implemented by the top 10 automakers.

Manufacturers use Cognos software and KPI services to:

Increase profitability

• Analyze cost components and drivers to reduce the cost of goods sold.
• Gain visibility into demand and sales trends to minimize inventory investment.
• Analyze the root cause of variances in order to drive down costs.
• Align the organization around critical revenue and profitability targets, and monitor performance.

Improve sales performance

• Analyze sales trends and customer buying behavior.
• Analyze pipeline and performance by brand, product, customer, channel, and geography
• Analyze and report on product margin performance, customer satisfaction, and campaign effectiveness.
• Monitor key sales, marketing, and revenue metrics.

Improve operational effectiveness

• Consolidate data from multiple sources to improve production planning, scheduling, and schedule adherence.
• Monitor key operational metrics using dashboards and scorecards.
• Identify and analyze excess, obsolete, or slow-moving inventory that can be scrapped or repurposed.
• Receive timely notification of events, such as late supplier delivery, changes in customer demand, or production stoppages.

Optimize the supply chain

• Identify and communicate changes in supply or demand to help increase throughput.
• Evaluate supplier performance in terms of quality, delivery, and price.
• Monitor and analyze freight costs.
• Receive Supply Chain Event Management notification for crucial events.

Leverage investments in ERP and other enterprise software 

• Integrate ERP, CRM, and legacy data for a single view of performance.
• Data integration is a key component within Cognos 8 Business Intelligence, a single product that provides complete BI capabilities on a proven architecture.
• Cognos data integration is an enterprise-wide ETL solution designed for high performance business intelligence. It optimizes data merging, extraction, transformation, and dimensional management to deliver data warehouses ready for business reporting and analysis.
• Build a self-service environment for business users that frees up IT resources and lowers TCO.  

Benefits and Value

Cognos integrated performance management software and services deliver value to the world's leading manufacturing organizations.

Reporting, analysis, and business intelligence
Cognos offers the most comprehensive business intelligence and reporting coverage in the industry.

You can use BI software to:

• Analyze sales and margin performance by customer, brand, product, channel, and category.
• Identify which processes and operations generate unfavorable variances and why.
• Reconcile inventory, production, and demand information to meet requested shipments without excessive expediting and overtime.
• Conduct defect analysis to identify sources of quality issues and support initiatives such as Six-Sigma.
• Report on performance by department, employee, machine, customer, product, and operation.
• Share information with key partners and suppliers through a BI extranet.

Scorecarding
Drive sales performance and effective supply chain management from your desktop.

With Cognos Scorecarding software, you can:

• Manage pipeline development and conversion to drive sales performance.
• Continuously monitor sales performance by product, brand, customer, and channel.
• Monitor operations performance in terms of efficiency, utilization, quality, cost, and throughput.
• Create and monitor key performance indicators, such as days sales outstanding, inventory value, customer backlog, customer fill rate, time to fill orders, and supplier performance.

Planning, forecasting, and consolidation
Cognos planning and consolidation software improves performance in the key aspects of your organization.

You can use planning and consolidation software to:

• Augment or replace cumbersome spreadsheet-based systems.
• Enable driver-based planning to streamline and focus efforts around HR plans, revenue planning, operations requirements, or sales resources.
• Use rolling forecasts to increase forward visibility into financial performance.
• Conduct what-if scenarios for different revenue projections or changes in business lines.

Production Analysis

Understanding production as part of Supply Chain Analytics.

The pre-built reports and metrics of the Cognos Production Analysis application give you a better understanding of your capacity, production line operations, work order flow, yield, quality, and costs. You can:

• Analyze production across plants and shifts to maximize efficiency and improve quality.
• Analyze yield by plant and shift to increase production and ensure timely delivery.
• Identify trends in product quality across shifts, plants, or locations.
• Compare actual material costs to planned costs.
• Work Order Material Usage and Cost
• • How does cost variance break down for each product? Are variances due to labor, material, or scrap?
  • What routing provides the most units at the lowest cost per unit?
  • What portion of work orders is complete? What portion remains to be completed?
• Time-to-Delivery
• • What is our success rate at meeting schedules?
  • What percentage of our products are delivered within 5/10/15/20 days prior to or after the schedule date?
  • What lead times are required for reliable order fulfillment?
• Quality and Yield
• • Which plants are performing best against standard cost/yield? Has this changed over time?
  • Is yield erratic at a particular plant? Is this a chronic problem or an aberration?
  • What is the breakdown of scrap for each operation? What are the dominant causes of scrap?
• Organizational Effectiveness
• • What are the costs of finished products by cost category? How do these costs compare among plants?
  • Which plants or factories are performing best against our standard costs? Has this changed over time?
  • Which plants have completed and closed the highest number of work orders on time?