Hess Corp., operator of more than 1,350 convenience stores in 14 states from Massachusetts to Florida, has chosen IBM Cognos BI to deliver a full range of business intelligence capabilities across its marketing and refining organization.

Looking to deliver unified access to critical information in its downstream operations, Hess executives decided to standardize its performance management on a single business intelligence solution. After an extensive review of competitive offerings, Hess chose Cognos because it delivers the complete spectrum of business intelligence functionality on a single platform, simplifying deployment and use.

Specifically, Hess will use IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence (BI) within its retail, refining, finance, energy marketing and corporate divisions, connecting all information into a single, enterprise view to provide greater visibility into core business drivers such as customer profitability, inventory levels, and risk positions. Finance managers and business analysts, for instance, will use the software to analyze performance trends and best model future year growth. In retail, IBM Cognos BI will be used to support its U.S. chain of over 1,300 Hess gasoline stations and Hess Express convenience stores, helping managers facilitate analysis and reporting on key store operations metrics, including product, category and segment sales, store performance against plan, and store-by-store comparisons, in order to easily identify trends and make necessary adjustments that drive customer satisfaction and profitable growth. Hess operations and marketing managers will also be able to use Cognos 8 BI Analysis for Microsoft Excel to perform multidimensional analysis on their data using traditional spreadsheets. With IBM Cognos 8 Go! Mobile, corporate executives, as well as regional and district managers, will be able to use their wireless handheld devices to read and securely interact with corporate performance information and make informed decisions regardless of their location or time. "IBM Cognos BI offers Hess the best approach to arming management with self-service access to their information that will ultimately lead to more streamlined operations and better decision-making,” said Jeff Steinhorn, chief information officer at Hess. “We now have a single, intuitive business intelligence solution that moves us to an environment where we can exploit and interact with all of our information systems to better identify trends, drill-down into details, and conduct performance analysis across the downstream organization.”