Powering smarter decision-making with ultra-fast, highly flexible analytics
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- IBM Cognos Business Intelligence 10.2
- IBM Cognos Planning
Tech Stack
- IBM Cognos
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Digital Expertise
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
Applicable Industries
- Utilities
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Energy Management System
Services
- System Integration
- Data Science Services
About The Customer
Basin Electric Power Cooperative is one of the largest electric generation and transmission cooperatives in the United States. The organization is not-for-profit, and is owned by its 138 member systems, which together serve 2.8 million rural consumers spread across nine states – from North Dakota to New Mexico. The company was facing challenges in data management, with data held in multiple systems, spreadsheets, and people’s heads. This was causing difficulties in decision-making, as there was no single source of truth for the data. The company recognized the need for a more sophisticated analytics solution to improve the accuracy and timeliness of its reporting processes.
The Challenge
Basin Electric Power Cooperative, one of the largest electric generation and transmission cooperatives in the United States, was struggling with data management. The company's data was held in dozens of systems, spreadsheets, and people’s heads, making it difficult to make informed decisions. The company recognized that its reliance on complex manual processes represented a serious risk to the business. In strategy meetings, staff were often unable to agree on the figures that they were meant to be analyzing. Too much time was spent trying to determine which system, spreadsheet or expert truly had the right information about a given issue – and this lack of visibility hampered the organization’s ability to make smart decisions.
The Solution
Basin Electric decided to harness the power of IBM analytics technologies to improve the accuracy and timeliness of its reporting processes. The company deployed IBM Cognos software to act as a centralized, controlled and consistent platform for business analytics. The organization initially deployed IBM Cognos Business Intelligence to support its budgetary process, and subsequently extended the solution to replace spreadsheet based reporting in almost all parts of its business. Later, Basin Electric also deployed IBM Cognos Planning to further enhance the budgetary process and eliminate another large set of spreadsheets. The Cognos solutions pull data for analysis directly from Basin Electric’s core systems, ensuring that calculations are always performed on up-to-date transactional data.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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