Al Esayi replaces BusinessObjects with Cognos e-BI

The company was using an ERP from Baan, which it believed was not suited for its operations and hence they are moving from Baan to Movex, which is a good fit for their line of business. With process automation well underway, Al Esayi Electronics saw investments in Performance Management and Business Intelligence as a priority.

"We sell over 300,000 appliances every month through retail sales, projects and dealers. So we needed access to multi-dimensional analysis as the electronics market is very dynamic. We are also in the middle of a COBIT adaptation and all processes need to comply with the framework. So BI is very key to our IT roadmap,"

said Samir Alwani, IT Director of Al Esayi Electronics and Group IT Committee Chief.

"We had earlier made an investment in a 20-user BI product from BusinessObjects. However, we faced a lot of issues with it. We did not get the correct product keys and post implementation support from BusinessObjects for over a year. The TCO was also not clear to us and hence we decided to re-visit the project and make a complete change", Alwani added. Following this decision, the company has now implemented Cognos Performance Management solution.

"We found that the Cognos product was very mature and well rounded on aspects like Web-based administration, user security and manageability. Also we want to link on-line BI/analysis capabilities to the Balanced Scorecard approach to KPI dashboards. Our vision is to build a business that can respond quickly to market changes. This involves having capabilities to read between the lines to optimize revenues and profits. BI therefore is integral to this plan" concluded Alwani.

Looking ahead, Al Esayi Electronics hopes to steamroll the BI investment to implement Enterprise Budgeting and Planning solution from Cognos in the near future.

"Al Esayi's selection of Cognos as its standard for performance management is illustrative of our continued competitive edge in the CPM market," said Nasser Tufail, Managing Director at BSG. "Cognos performance management solution provides a modern decision-making platform with a clear line of sight to turn data assets into actionable information enabling faster and more informed decisions that positively impact the organization."