Achmea, the largest insurance group in the Dutch market, employs 22,000 people working in six departments: Care, Pensions, Social Security, Direct Distribution, Monetary Distribution and Intermediary Distribution, and Group IT Services. Each division has its own key activities and operates under several brands. Cognos will be implemented across the enterprise to support business-critical and strategic goals, including financial and business scenario-based planning.

With Cognos 8 BI, Achmea will have a single product that easily integrates into its existing infrastructure, which has multiple systems and data sources. After Cognos successfully implemented two performance management projects for the Social Security Division in 2006, Achmea decided to implement Cognos across its enterprise. The Cognos consulting organization played a crucial role in the successful completion of the projects by aligning Achmea’s strategic objectives with the Cognos 8 BI implementation.

“We use integrated business performance management to monitor the strategy execution,” said Miloje Stevanovic, Manager of Change Management and IT at Achmea. “Cognos 8 BI provides us with a very solid base and a strong information platform.”

Achmea now has the complete range of BI capabilities from analysis, scorecarding, and reporting, on a single, proven architecture. In addition to delivering a single point of entry for business managers to access information, Cognos 8 BI will simplify deployment and administration for the IT department and reduce programming time. Cognos 8 BI is a groundbreaking product that provides decision makers at all levels of the enterprise with a consistent, accurate view of information to better manage performance. As a single product that easily integrates into existing infrastructures with multiple systems and data sources, Cognos 8 BI is a robust technology foundation for BI standardization and performance management.

“More and more companies realize that they aren’t able to increase their efficiency with their operational systems,” said Laurence Trigwell, senior director of financial services solutions at Cognos. “Strategic information is what matters. Achmea’s standardization is demonstrative of our vision of BI and performance management working together across the enterprise for all decision makers. Achmea now has a consistent, accurate view of information to better manage its performance.”

Cognos is a recognized leader in delivering performance management solutions for the insurance industry. Over 1,000 financial services institutions worldwide use Cognos, including 4 of the top 5 global insurance companies. Insurance customers include AAA Life, AIG, Aviva, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) – Insurance division, Chubb Insurance Company of Europe, MetLife and Prudential UK. For more information about Cognos solutions for the insurance industry, please visit http://www.cognos.com/solutions/industry/banking-financial-services/ insurance.html. (Due to its length, this URL may need to be copied/pasted into your Internet browser's address field. Remove the extra space if one exists.)

About Achmea

Achmea is the largest insurance group on the Dutch market. Achmea operates under brands such as Interpolis, Centraal Beheer Achmea, Zilveren Kruis Achmea, Avéro Achmea and FBTO. The common ambition of all insurers and service providers in Achmea is to take care of their clients’ cares. Central questions in this matter are safety, health, pension, workforce participation, company continuity and conditions of employment. For more information, please visit the Web site: http://www.achmea.nl

About Cognos

Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, provides world-class enterprise planning and BI software and services to help companies plan, understand and manage financial and operational performance.

Cognos brings together technology, analytical applications, best practices, and a broad network of partners to give customers a complete performance system. The Cognos performance system is an open and adaptive solution that leverages an organisation’s ERP, packaged applications, and database investments. It gives customers the ability to answer the questions – How are we doing? Why are we on or off track? What should we do about it? – and enables them to understand and monitor current performance while planning future business strategies.

Cognos serves more than 23,000 customers in more than 135 countries, and its top 100 enterprise customers consistently outperform market indexes. Cognos performance management solutions and services are also available from more than 3,000 worldwide partners and resellers. For more information, visit the Cognos Web site at http://www.cognos.com.

Cognos and the Cognos logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cognos Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. All other names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

Note to Editors:

Copies of previous Cognos press releases and Corporate and product information are available on Cognos' Web site at http://www.cognos.com, and at BusinessWire’s site at http://www.businesswire.com