Animal Health Board Nurtures Financial Planning

MEDIA RELEASE

Animal Health Board Nurtures Financial Planning with IBM Cognos Performance Management Solution

WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND – 13 May 2009: IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced today that that the Animal Health Board (AHB), has selected IBM Cognos TM1 to streamline the organisation’s financial planning, forecasting and reporting requirements.

The Animal Health Board (AHB) is an incorporated society, legally responsible for managing and implementing the National Pest Management Strategy for bovine tuberculosis in New Zealand. Its powers derive from the Biosecurity Act 1993 and its mission is to eradicate bovine TB from New Zealand. It is accountable to its member organisations and has responsibilities for reporting to the Minister of Agriculture.

AHB selected IBM CognosTM1 following a competitive market review.

“We have become an increasingly decentralised organisation in recent years and our existing package was limited in its capacity to provide our managers with the level of financial detail they require within security constraints. Budgeting and forecasting has become a complex and lengthy exercise with spreadsheets and manual consolidation,” said AHB’s Finance Manager, Joy Tracey.

IBM Cognos TM1 provides a real-time approach to consolidating, viewing, and editing large volumes of multidimensional data. Using a patented, 64-bit, in-memory OLAP server, IBM Cognos TM1 provides organisations with a single view of the organisation’s performance.

Once deployed with the assistance of IBM Cognos partner, Cortell, the IBM Cognos TM1 solution will initially be used for AHB’s budgeting and forecasting purposes. It will assist around 40 line managers and central administration staff to generate consolidated cost centre management and financial reports, creating a pool of financial and operational metrics and key performance indicators.

AHB will also deploy IBM Cognos TM1 for performance reporting and scorecarding. This will enable the organisation to integrate and consolidate information from their data sources such as VectorNet, AHB’s award-winning vector monitoring application which helps improve the organisation’s ability to make smarter, faster and more accurate vector control decisions.

The IBM Cognos TM1 solution will also provide the organisation with additional security in enabling only certain members of the organisation to access the general ledger as well as specific data on monthly expenses and year-to-date financial summaries.

“IBM Cognos TM1 will arm us with the flexibility to produce data in the way in which we need the information to be expressed. It will give us a hierarchical way of looking at data as well as being able to readily extract adhoc information to support anaylsis and forecasting solutions. We have complete confidence in Cortell and look forward to having their developers on-site providing skills transfer and management during deployment,” said Tracey.

IBM Cognos TM1 will be fully operational across AHB’s business by 30 June 2009.

For more information about The Animal Health Board, visit: www.ahb.org.nz

For more information on IBM, please visit www.ibm.com

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