Business intelligence (BI) vendors Cognos and Business Objects have added new tools to their product lines to give better insight into organisations' financial activities.

Cognos last week updated its PowerPlay Olap server to deliver more detailed and easier-to-manage analysis. PowerPlay 7.3 lets users create subsets of categories by rule and by pick list, and lets them focus their analysis in these specific areas.

The latest version enables the creation of dimensional models combining data from multiple sources. Users can then govern drill-through targets by dimension level, so that drill-through is limited to lower levels of the cube. In this way, analysis becomes more targeted, the volume of information sent is reduced, and network performance is optimised, said the company.

Cognos has also improved the performance of PowerPlay - an underlying technology for Cognos' financial planning applications - with a high-performance data cache to enable faster analysis.

Karen Williams, vice-president of product marketing at Cognos, said the update will allow business people to carry out more flexible and detailed data analysis, without the need for assistance from IT staff. This will help firms respond more quickly to rapidly changing business demands, she said.

"In addition, IT organisations will be more able to deal with strategic initiatives since the user community is enabled to respond to many of their own information demands," she added.

Cognos also announced last week that it had joined the Business Performance Management (BPM) Standards Group, established to help firms implement BPM systems. Williams said BI systems would be increasingly used for BPM.

Last week BI vendor Business Objects also extended its product line, by releasing a financial analysis tool to give companies better insight into their financial operations. The Finance Intelligence tool contains six modules to help business managers analyse activities such as cashflow and financial statement metrics.

Commenting on the new release, John Van Decker of analyst firm Meta Group said, "Products that provide financial intelligence enable organisations to improve the management of their corporate compliance initiatives, while providing timely analysis of key financial metrics throughout their organisation."

Chris Caren, Business Objects' vice-president of corporate marketing, said firms are aware of the benefits of automating financial information, and the new tool will help them to identify financial trends and the reasons behind business results.