Stonebridge Announces Successful Customer Implementations of Cognos Enterprise Planning Solution Suite

DALLAS, January 14, 2004 – Stonebridge Technologies, a leading provider of business technology consulting and systems integration services, announces it has recently completed Cognos Enterprise Planning software implementation and custom development for five customers. The customers represent a diverse range of industries including energy, distribution, media and entertainment, and grocery.

Stonebridge CEO James Ivy said, “Enterprise planning is a management discipline that creates sustainable competitive advantage. From our perspective, Cognos Enterprise Planning offers organizations an integrated, best-in-breed solution for planning, budgeting, forecasting, modeling, consolidation, and financial reporting.”

As a strategic management tool, enterprise planning enables an organization to create and communicate strategy; drive planning, budgeting, execution, and delivery; and measure performance at every level across the enterprise.

Stonebridge is a leading designer and architect of Cognos Enterprise Planning solution suite. A Cognos Pinnacle Partner, Stonebridge has in-depth understanding and competency in the Cognos Enterprise Planning software, which includes:

• Cognos Analyst — planning, budgeting, and forecasting
• Cognos Contributor — plan collaboration and control
• Cognos Consolidation — consolidation and financial planning

The recently completed implementations demonstrate Stonebridge’s Cognos Enterprise Planning expertise:

• A Newspaper Publisher needed an enterprise business intelligence solution to monitor corporate performance management in two functional areas: advertising planning and financial reporting. Stonebridge helped the company deploy Cognos Consolidation and tailor the application to its needs. Using Consolidation, the advertising department can pull weekly rolling forecasts of revenue from sales representatives and department executives. This data can then be analyzed against budget as well as prior-year and actual trends. On the financial reporting side, the Cognos Enterprise Planning suite enables the accounting department to consolidate financial input from multiple disparate source systems, including those from separate company-owned subsidiaries, into a single data repository and perform multidimensional analysis of the company’s financial position. Complex variable analysis, which used to take days to assemble using Excel spreadsheets and manually keyed data, now takes only a matter of minutes to model and analyze.

• An Exploration and Production Company specializing in acquiring, developing, and operating oil and gas properties needed anautomated process for allocating production-related earnings and expense allocations for its various business partners. Stonebridge helped the company implement Cognos Consolidation to satisfy its requirement for complex reverse allocations. The Cognos solution includes a consolidated financial model delivering statutory, management, and ad hoc reporting, including the capability to “slice” data across multiple dimensions and drill into aggregated numbers for additional detailed information. The solution also enables the company to handle different currency conversion profiles. Prior to the Cognos solution, the allocation model was performed on a 99-tab Excel spreadsheet, which could not be expanded due to the application’s limitations. Additionally, the old process typically required weeks of rework to meet corporate requirements. Today, the model runs automatically via the Cognos solution and supports maximum scalability to meet changing business needs, and modifications are accomplished in a fraction of the time.

• A Supermarket Chain required that daily sales and inventory data from individual stores integrated with other data sources, including the company’s Oracle 11i financial system and its point-of-sale and human resource systems. Stonebridge developed a business intelligence solution based on Cognos Consolidation that aggregates data along multiple dimensions including location, department, and vendor. The company’s executive management benefits from a Web-based dashboard that presents near real-time business results with budget and forecast expectations. The solution also provides tailored data views to corporate and retail outlet users across the entire enterprise. Formerly, the process was labor-intensive, with analysts at the corporate headquarters compiling disparate input from each store. With the Cognos solution, daily sales and inventory data is acquired via the Web each morning and automatically aggregated for immediate analysis.

• An Energy Company with operations in the United States, Canada, and Central America needed a more efficient way of managing multiple general ledgers, most of which resided on multiple spreadsheets in different formats. The company’s mergers and acquisitions strategy, which introduced additional accounting, production, and drilling systems into the mix, perpetuated the challenge. Stonebridge helped the company implement Cognos Consolidation and Cognos PowerPlay to streamline and simplify reporting processes - ending the company’s reliance on spreadsheets - and to create enterprise analytical reporting standards and capabilities such as rolling forecast data.

• An International Food and Beverage Distributor needed a business intelligence solution to track variances in actual dailybusiness activities from multiple distribution facilities against quarterly and annual forecasts. Stonebridge helped the company create a scorecard solution using Cognos Metrics Manager. The solution captures daily sales, SG&A, and overhead forecasts in a rolling format. Indicators in the scorecard show the actual status and trend of each metric. Additionally, the client uses Cognos Consolidation, Cognos Analyst, and Cognos Contributor for corporate financial consolidation and reporting delivered via the Web. Prior to implementing Cognos, collecting and aggregating variously formatted spreadsheets from multiple locations was a labor-intensive process prone to errors. For the client, the process had become so difficult that it would only request forecast inputs annually. With the Cognos solution, revised inputs can be gathered and made useful for business decision and analysis several times monthly, if required.

“For organizations considering Cognos Enterprise Planning implementations, our experience with and knowledge of the Cognos application suite puts Stonebridge at the top of the list of Cognos-specific integration consultancies,” Ivy said.

About Stonebridge Technologies

Stonebridge Technologies provides business and technology integration services to help organizations enhance financial performance and achieve a higher level of operational excellence through more effective integration of data, processes and technology. Stonebridge’s solutions are focused on business intelligence, business process integration, collaboration and knowledge management, and fully integrated server and storage networks, and are built on the company’s deep experience in technology consulting, systems integration, custom application development and packaged-solutions implementation and upgrades. More information about Stonebridge is available at www.sbti.com and by telephone at 800-776-9755.

Note: Cognos is a trademark of Cognos Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries.