Paramount Cards Pushes the Envelope with Cognos Business Intelligence

— Cognos, Creative Computing deliver 'high fidelity' reporting to 95-year old greeting card company —

Paramount Cards, the third largest U.S. greeting card company, found they were spending too much time compiling, printing, and mailing sales performance tracking reports to field sales personnel. Paramount looked to Cognos (Nasdaq:COGN; TSE:CSN), the leading global provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, to provide them with an answer. In partnership with Creative Computing, a Cognos Premier Business Partner, Cognos offered an enterprise business intelligence solution that allowed Paramount to quickly and closely track sales trends, creating a powerful view of the information in its data warehouse.

Based in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Paramount Cards has evolved over 95 years into a high-end, full-line supplier of quality greeting cards to the card and party, drug store, and grocery markets. Cognos business intelligence has been deployed in the Premier Greetings division to provide the global sales force with a powerful, Web-based reporting and analysis solution, enabling them to dramatically reduce report creation times, derive critical customer insights, and make faster, more informed decisions.

"The Cognos BI solution leapfrogs what we previously used by providing far more reports with far more data and the functionality has certainly exceeded our expectations. The time our IT department spends on this reporting has actually decreased," said Mark Deuschle, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing. "We've eliminated the discussions about where data is. We've eliminated the re-keying of crude profit and loss information into spreadsheets. With Cognos Web-based, high-fidelity reporting, we've created a real partnership with our end users by enabling unprecedented information self-service."

Using Cognos PowerPlay®, users are able to combine data from separate sources such as forecasted goals versus actual performance. Now, instead of waiting until mid-month for last month's results, the sales organization has performance data available on the corporate Intranet almost immediately. Cognos Impromptu® allows users to examine the relationship between seasonal bookings and actual sales, compare trends year-over-year, and, most importantly, influence performance at the store level by making targeted recommendations based on hard data and analysis instead of hunches and guesswork.

Soon, the entire field sales force will be able to access the system from anywhere, all through a single, secure Web portal. In the coming months, Paramount Cards will develop a comprehensive 360-degree view of every customer, forecasting and tracking sales, profitability, inventory, and turnover.

"Because Paramount Cards is committed to delivering the very best personalized service with every customer interaction, it needed to out-service its competition and create tangible value in the eyes of their customers," said David Laverty, Cognos senior vice president of global marketing. "Using Cognos, Paramount has the right information, at the right time, in the right people's hands to make the best decisions possible."

Paramount Cards has been a high-quality greeting card manufacturer since 1906. Paramount's products have changed over the years effected by the trends and events in our times. From world wars to the new millennium, Paramount has offered products to meet the ever-changing needs of their retailers and consumers.

Creative Computing, Inc., a leading Cognos Services Partner, has been designing, building and deploying business intelligence solutions based on Cognos software products for over 10 years. By following a Best Practices approach Creative Computing has successfully partnered with hundreds of Cognos customers, allowing them to build environments designed to enable key business users to access relevant business information. Creative Computing is headquartered in Lincoln, RI, with offices in Boston, MA, Cleveland, OH, and Washington, DC. http://www.creatcomp.com.


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