Eastman Chemical Company has selected Cognos to drive enterprise reporting as the company migrates to the SAP NetWeaver platform. A Fortune 500 company, Eastman is the world's largest producer of PET polymers for packaging.In early 2005, the comp-any decided to upgrade its corporate data warehouse from its legacy custom-built solution, to the data warehouse component found within SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence. After a series of product evaluations, Eastman selected Cognos for its open data access, seamless integration with the SAP NetWeaver platform, superior time to deployment and ease of use.
Cognos was one of the first vendors to achieve "Powered by SAP NetWeaver" certification, and could tap into both data warehouses and present the information to users in a single view. Through a proof of concept, company officials were particularly impressed by Cognos' ability to pull data from multiple sources, simplifying reporting across departments without having to re-train users or re-architect standard reporting processes.
"There are three things that we must always deliver to our clients when implementing a new system – it must meet the user's needs, it must do so in a useable interface, and it absolutely has to perform. Cognos gives us the flexibility we need to migrate the company to SAP while also providing users with the proven, consistent and accurate reporting they need to continue to do their jobs effectively," said Larry Perdue, IT manager of business marketing and sales solutions at Eastman.
This migration will eventually enable Eastman to mobilize Cognos for greater data analysis and to streamline performance management reporting. "Cognos performed extremely well in a recent proof of concept and offers us the opportunity to explore how we can incrementally move our business intelligence to the next level, where our end users can evolve from generating reports, to generating business value through focused analysis and insights," added Perdue.
