Canadian Pacific Railway Uses Business Objects to Improve Asset Utilization.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 10, 2001

Business Objects Solutions Helps Leading North American Railway

Measure and Report On-Time Shipment Performance

Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) is a company that lives by the clock. Timetables, shipments, and customer satisfaction are all tied to Father Time. Now, with Business Objects (Nasdaq:BOBJ), the world's leading provider of e-business intelligence (e-BI) solutions, CPR can better analyze the utilization of more than 80,000 railcars to meet service delivery standards it sets by customer.

CPR, one of the largest railway companies in North America, uses BusinessObjects(TM), the integrated query, reporting and online analytical processing tool (OLAP) from Business Objects, for two major purposes. CPR analyzes the movement of all of its railcars to identify opportunities to optimize asset utilization.

It also tracks shipments to customers against delivery commitments to identify opportunities to improve service. Shipment performance metrics resulting from this analysis are shared with customers. CPR's shipment performance standards are better than or equivalent to any Class 1 railroad (the largest railroads in North America), and the company is leveraging Business Objects to improve even further.

The ease of reporting and analytical capabilities available in Business Objects allow experts in the Freight Car Management and Field Operations to look at overall patterns in railcar movement and to quickly drill down into opportunity areas. CPR looks at asset velocity and the timeliness of connections in its major railyards as key indicators of performance. Business Objects allows CPR to quickly select a particular railyard, or a subset of railcars, for more detailed analysis. At the most detailed level, CPR's experts can see each movement an individual railcar made while traveling from origin to destination. Currently, more than 400 CPR employees use Business Objects and generate nearly 1,000 reports daily using the solution.

"Using this new technology, we get powerful analytical capabilities into the hands of our business experts, who are geographically dispersed," said Arthur Cunningham, general manager of CPR's service excellence initiative. "Across our 14,000 mile network in two countries, we can easily distribute the results of our analysis to all stake holders in the company."

"Canadian Pacific Railway was looking for a way to optimize business and that is exactly what Business Objects provided by giving the company a way to access its data and then make the best use of the information in the day-to-day decision making process," said Alex Moissis, vice president of marketing for North.

CPR has its eye on the future as well, using Business Objects solutions with other products currently being used by the company.

"One of the strengths of Business Objects is the architecture is such that we can use it across other platforms and integrate it with other offerings we have under way," said Cunningham. "For example, we can integrate it into our website. CPR has more to come by continuing to think of new and innovative way to use Business Objects products."

About Canadian Pacific Railway

Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) is one of the largest railway systems in North America. CPR owns a fleet of about 1,600 locomotives and 48,000 freight cars, and each day has about 275 trains and some 80,000 freight cars on its 22,500 km (14,000 miles) of rail lines in Canada and the U.S. CPR serves more than 30,000 customers, providing rail and intermodal freight transportation services coast to coast over a network extending from Montreal to Vancouver, and throughout the U.S. Midwest and Northeast. Commercial alliances with other carriers extend CPR's market reach across Mexico, the U.S. and Canada.

The railway is using Business Objects solutions for analysis and reporting of shipment performance and equipment utilization. With Business Objects, CPR can identify opportunities to increase the productivity of railcars and deliver improved reporting to customers. Major internal users of the tool are the Performance Measurement, Performance Improvement and Operations Performance groups within the Customer Service Team, the Freight Car Management team and the Field Operations group which is responsible for scheduling and moving trains. The tool allows multiple groups to view, monitor and address issues from both the shipment performance and asset utilization perspectives.

About Business Objects

Business Objects is the world's leading provider of e-business intelligence (e-BI) solutions. The company coined the term e-business intelligence in 1998 to describe the intersection of business intelligence and the internet. Using e-business intelligence, organizations can access, analyze, and share information in intranet, extranet, and e-business environments. In intranets, the company's products provide employees with information to make better business decisions, and are used in environments ranging from workgroups of 20 users to enterprise deployments exceeding 20,000. In the extranet environment, the company is pioneering the use of e-BI in applications that allow organizations to build stronger relationships by linking customers, partners, and suppliers via the internet. In addition, the company's products can improve the performance of an e-business by providing reporting and analysis against the ever-expanding amount of transaction and profile data that is collected each day throughout the world wide web.

Founded in 1990, Business Objects pioneered the modern business intelligence industry by inventing and patenting a "semantic layer" that insulates users from the technical complexity of database systems. Today, the company has over 11,500 customers in more than 80 countries. The company's stock is publicly traded under the ticker symbols Nasdaq: BOBJ and Euronext Paris: code SICOVAM 12074, and included in the SBF 120 and IT CAC 50 French stock market indexes. Business Objects can be reached at 408/953-6000 and http://www.businessobjects.com.

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