In Conversation with OPG Wholesale: How They Succeeded with the Help of Cognos Consulting and Training

OPG is an international retail and distribution company for pharmaceuticals and medical supplies and specializing in:

• operating pharmacies and wholesaling (pharmacies),
• medical supplies for home healthcare and related services (direct)
• marketing and distribution of pharmaceuticals and medical supplies to hospitals and nursing homes (institutional)

Koen Gudde, Cognos Project Manager, OPG Wholesale

In 2004, the wholesale organization in the Netherlands implemented a new ERP-system. Specialized developers spent a significant amount of time creating reports and 'analysis' for this system. Ongoing maintenance for these reports was quite time intensive as end users were not able to create or update their own reports.

In an effort to reduce the resources required to build and maintain these reports and create a more standardized ERP-system, OPG decided to implement the BI tools from Cognos on top of the underlying data warehouse. This would allow business users to create and maintain their own reports in an easy way and combine data from several different systems to create highly valuable information.

OPG Wholesale engaged Cognos Consulting to help them develop a project plan and ensure a successful implementation. As OPG wanted users to be able to create reports within the Cognos solution on their own, they also engaged Cognos Training to help them develop a training plan for employees. OPG felt strongly that training for users would be a key success factor for the project.

A 'key user group' of 20 people was set up and they attended customized group training sessions for BI Authoring and PowerPlay. This training was fit into the implementation phase to ensure the right users would be trained at the right time. The customized group training format also allowed for intensive question and answer sessions which proved to be quite useful.

Another 130 'standard' end-users were also trained in a customized half-day training session that taught users about the system, how to use it and how to optimize the value of the Cognos solution.

Reflecting on the project, Koen Gudde, Project lead for Cognos implementation summed it up the following way,

"When I look at the number of reports created and used on daily basis, I truly believe we succeeded in this and of course we will continue to manage this success in the future.

"Working together with Cognos Consulting and Training brought significant value to OPG's Cognos solution. The customized courses were incredibly successful and it has definitely been a useful engagement which I would recommend to any organization."