Case Study: Basin Electric Power Cooperative achieves faster, more accurate decisions and up to 85% faster reporting with IBM Cognos (IBM)

Powering smarter decision-making with ultra-fast, highly flexible analytics

Basin Electric Power Cooperative struggled with fragmented data spread across dozens of systems, linked spreadsheets and people’s heads, which caused disputed figures, manual reconciliation and dependency on individual staff knowledge. To create a single source of truth and improve confidence in its numbers, Basin Electric turned to IBM and deployed IBM Cognos software (Cognos Business Intelligence and Cognos Planning).

Working with IBM, Basin Electric centralized analytics, automated data gathering and report generation from core systems, and replaced most spreadsheet-based reporting. The Cognos deployment cut reporting time dramatically — a 150‑page annual report dropped from three months to two weeks (an 85% time saving), automated overnight reports save about 40 person-hours per week, and reporting resilience was maintained even after large staff retirements — delivering measurable productivity gains and faster, more trustworthy decision-making.

Basin Electric Power Cooperative

Joseph Thomas

Senior Business Systems Analyst