Great Clips Selects IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence Software for Retail Reporting and Analysis

Cognos Reporting and Analysis Capabilities to Manage Leading Retailer’s Franchise Operations, Salon Performance and Enhance Brand



LAS VEGAS, NV .- Cognos, an IBM company and the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today announced that Minneapolis-based Great Clips has selected IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence (BI) as its standard to streamline operational reporting and analysis.

With over 2600 locations, Great Clips is the largest franchised salon brand in North America. The company wanted to better support salon operations by automating its reporting and analysis processes and providing business users with increased access to performance information through self-service capabilities. This will give the chain better visibility into salon performance, franchise operations, location openings, promotion effectiveness, business trends and its customer base.

To streamline these efforts, Great Clips conducted a comprehensive competitive review to find a BI solution with robust enterprise reporting capabilities that were easy to use and maintain. IBM Cognos 8 BI was selected to integrate with Great Clips’ Microsoft environment and seamlessly pull data from a number of disparate sources including the company’s financial, human resources, franchise, legal, and Point of Sale (PoS) systems.

“Our strategy is to purchase flexible, best-in-class applications that require minimal maintenance deploy quickly and give managers easy-to-use ‘self-serve’ capabilities,” said Kathy Wetzel, Vice-President, IT, Great Clips. “With Cognos we can reduce reporting and analysis efforts and improve data consistency and accuracy, which will give our operations and franchising managers the insight needed to make better decisions. We expect to see a rapid payback on our investment simply from freeing our business users from manual analysis.”

“Retailers of all sizes need powerful, proven and user-friendly BI solutions for real-time visibility into business performance,” said Patricia Vekich Waldron, global retail industry director, Cognos. “In partnership with Cognos, Great Clips can harness the power of their existing systems to get a complete view of performance across the organization so they can optimize their business by improving salon operations, managing margins and enhancing their brand.”

Cognos also is working with Great Clips on the implementation of the BI solution.