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Chapter 4 • Business Reporting, Visual Analytics, and Business Performance Management 199

at the rate of 70 percent. For new food products, the failure rate is 80 percent. For new
pharmaceutical products, it is even higher, around 90 percent. Overall, the rate of failure
for most new projects or ventures runs between 60 and 80 percent. Given these numbers,
the answer to the question of “what do we need to do differently?” becomes a vital issue.

Application Case 4.7 shows how a large construction and consultancy company
implemented an integrated reporting system to better track their financials and other
important KPIs across its international branches.

Application Case 4.7

IBM Cognos Express Helps Mace for Faster and Better Business Reporting
Headquartered in the UK, Mace is an international international division. We also liked the web inter-
consultancy and construction company that offers face, which we knew our international users would
highly integrated services across the full property be able to access easily.”
and infrastructure lifecycle. It employs 3,700 peo- “We engaged with Barrachd, an IBM Business
ple in more than 60 countries worldwide, and is Partner, to support us during the project, and they
involved in some of the world’s highest-profile proj- did a very professional job. They helped us nego-
ects, such as the construction of London’s “Shard”, tiate a reasonable price for the software licenses,
the tallest building in Western Europe. delivered excellent technical support, and provided
Many of Mace’s international projects are us with access to the right IBM experts whenever we
contracted on a fixed-price basis, and their suc- needed them.”
cess depends on the company’s ability to control
costs and maintain profitability. Until recently, the rapid implementation
only way for senior managers to gain a full under- The implementation was completed within six
standing of international operations was a monthly months, despite all the complexities of importing
report, based on a complex spreadsheet which drew data from multiple accounting systems and handling
data from numerous different accounting systems in exchange rate calculations for operations in over 40
subsidiaries around the world. countries. Mace is using all four modules of IBM
Brendan Kitley, Finance Systems Manager at Cognos Express: Xcelerator and Planner for model-
Mace, comments: “The spreadsheet on which we ing and planning; Reporter for business intelligence;
based our international reports had about 40 tabs and Advisor for several important dashboards.
and hundreds of cross-links, which meant it was “We have been really impressed by the ease
very easy to introduce errors, and the lack of a stan- of development with Cognos Express,” comments
dardized approach was affecting accuracy and con- Brendan Kitley. “Setting up new applications and cubes
sistency. We wanted to find a more robust process is relatively quick and simple, and we feel that we’ve
for financial reporting.” only scratched the surface of what we can achieve. We
have a lot of Cognos skills and experience in-house,
finding the right partner so we are keen to build a wider range of functional-
Mace was already using IBM Cognos TM1® software ities into Cognos Express as we move forward.”
for its domestic business in the UK, and was keen to faster, More sophisticated reporting
find a similar solution for the international business.
“We decided to use IBM Cognos Express as The first major project with Cognos Express was
the foundation of our international reporting plat- to replicate the default reports that used to be pro-
form,” says Brendan Kitley. “We were impressed by duced by the old spreadsheet-based process. This
its ability to give us many of the same capabilities was achieved relatively quickly, so the team was
as our TM1 solution, but at a price-point that was able to move on to a second phase of developing
more affordable for an organization the size of our more sophisticated and detailed reports.
(Continued )

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