BURLINGTON MA, July 31, 2003—Cognos (Nasdaq:COGN; TSX:CSN), the world leader in business intelligence (BI) and corporate performance management, today announced that Cognos Enterprise Planning Series is at work in some of the nation's leading food retailers. Cognos Enterprise Planning Series, a component of Cognos' Corporate Performance Management Solutions, streamlines the performance management cycle, bringing together planning, budgeting, forecasting, consolidations, reporting, and financial analytics to eliminate the inconsistencies that constrain effective decision-making.

Among the many food retailers nationwide using Cognos Enterprise Planning Series are California Pizza Kitchen (Nasdaq: CPKI), a leading casual dining chain in the premium pizza segment; the third largest producer of dry pasta products in North America, Dakota Growers Pasta; and Pilgrim's Pride (NYSE: CHX), a leader in the production of prepared and fresh chicken in North America.

"Cognos solutions have enjoyed broad-based interest from almost every vertical industry segment. From financial services to the public sector to entertainment to healthcare, Cognos has a global customer base of more than 22,000 customers across markets and around the world," said Dave Kleinhans, vice president of Enterprise Planning for Cognos. "Through our work with leading food retailers, we continue to evolve and develop our industry-leading enterprise planning solutions to allow these organizations to generate cost efficiencies, serve their customers better, and address the demands of the market rapidly."

Leading food retailers that have selected Cognos Enterprise Planning Series include:

California Pizza Kitchen:
California Pizza Kitchen (CPK) is a leading casual dining chain in the premium pizza segment with a recognized consumer brand and an established, loyal customer base. Founded in 1985, there are currently more than 130 full service restaurants in over 26 states, the District of Columbia, and five foreign countries.

Before implementing Cognos, CPK used spreadsheets to plan and track the P&L statements and line items. During this process, the finance team had a difficult time managing the volumes of data, complex calculations, and constant changes to the spreadsheets. It took several weeks of two people working full time to obtain one single version of the P&L and future forecast. In addition, the team was limited by the software's inability to link cells and calculations across multiple spreadsheets so updating other areas of corporate records became a time-consuming task.

"Although many other vendors like Hyperion had similar features, Cognos Enterprise Planning Series was the only product to offer the powerful 'breakback' feature, which enabled the finance team to conduct 'what-if' scenarios in real time," said Diana Araos, manager of Financial Planning, California Pizza Kitchen. "We have also gained the ability to drill down into the smallest factor, or key performance indicator, to see the implications of a change on a forecast. With Cognos, quarterly forecasting cycles have been reduced from eight days to two days. The finance team can now spend more time reviewing the results rather than data collection and input."

Dakota Growers Pasta:
Originally organized in 1991 as a cooperative of durum wheat growers, Dakota Growers Pasta Company, Inc. continues as the third largest producer of dry pasta products in North America. Dakota Growers is the leading supplier of retail store brand pasta and a leader in the foodservice and ingredient pasta markets.

Prior to implementing Cognos, Dakota Growers Pasta leveraged Excel spreadsheets - with one person from Dakota's finance department in charge of budgeting and reporting. This left a lack of accountability within the company because finance was putting the data together and not employees in the various departments.

"Cognos Enterprise Planning Series is very efficient and saves the company a great deal of time," said Susette Allmaras, financial analyst, Dakota Growers Pasta. "Cognos is giving Dakota greater visibility into operations, more confidence in forecasts and plans, reduced plan cycle time, and increased number of people involved in process. In today's economy, the ability to run 'what-if' scenarios throughout the budget and forecast process has been a critical advantage."

Pilgrim's Pride:
Pilgrim's Pride Corporation is the second largest poultry producer in the United States; the third largest in chicken and fifth largest in turkey, and second largest chicken company in Mexico. Pilgrim's Pride employs more than 24,500 persons and operates processing and further processing plants, distribution centers, hatcheries and feed mills in Texas, Arkansas, Arizona, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia and Mexico.

Prior to using Cognos, Pilgrim's Pride used SAP to plan its supply chain operations, forecasting everything from hen placements, egg sets, broiler placement, grain consumption, miles driven. However, external market factors like grain, packaging, ingredients and fuel prices often changed rapidly. Plans were out-of-date before they were published. The complexity of calculations and interactions between drivers, plans and other factors across their operations, combined with the non-financial nature of much of its planning process, made any other tool they were considering incapable of meeting their forecasting needs.

Cognos' enterprise planning software allows Pilgrim's Pride to have insight into their business by enabling them to integrate their operational production plans with their financial plans.

"Our planning cycle time was reduced from more than six months to approximately two weeks. Cognos Enterprise Planning has allowed us to implement a rolling forecast approach that is updated monthly across the enterprise. This allows more accurate forecasting and that has led to savings. We can now tell our suppliers in advance, what we need and when." said Jeff Butrum, Director of Forecasting and Reporting for Pilgrim's Pride Corporation.