Product History
Historically IBM Cognos Enterprise Planning and Business Intelligence(BI) suites were disconnected and indeed the BI suite was a series of disparate reporting applications, ReportNet, PowerPlay, Impromtu. The introduction of Cognos Series-8 was a major integration step for all BI products now called ‘studios’ residing on one common BI layer and architecture. Now the User simply launches the BI portal to access all their pre-built and self service reports from one interface.
Common Foundation Layer for Planning and BI
Enterprise Planning, still very much disconnected on versions 7.3/8.1 was then brought into the fold with the new generation of Planning 8.2/8.3. This new generation of Enterprise Planning is now more tightly integrated than ever before with both product suites sharing the same underlying architecture or Foundation Layer. Many of the BI concepts and components are now available to the planning environment, thereby offering a host of new functionality and process improvements.
Reporting Planning Data
As with Planning Series-7 the 8.2/8.3 generation planning data can be reported directly from Contributor without publishing. However, the traditional approach to BI is still required for the more advanced and common reporting requirement – Publish, upload to FM Model or Transformer. The big gain with the latest version is the introduction of Incremental Publish. This capability means that for the majority of the planning cycle just the changed data is published thereby greatly reducing the turnaround time to produce ‘Live reports’ from the Planning datasets.
Contributor FM Model Extension
The FM model can be automatically generated from Contributor thereby generating significant savings to the manual maintenance of the FM Model for reporting purposes. Whilst this functionality was also available in Series-7 of Planning it was less functionally rich and under utilised as needed BI components installed and configured. Now all the BI components are installed and configured by default in Content Manager allowing more wide spread use of this functionality.
Validations
Contributor models deliver the planning/forecast process to the enterprise but have always had a gap – the end-user is allowed to submit incomplete data sets or exceed thresholds. The introduction of Validations in Planning 8.2/8.3 closes this gap taking Contributor to the next level of process delivery! Each e-list node (cost centre or organisational entity) can now be assigned thresholds for certain expense lines to manage overspend or check-items can be incorporated into the model design to determine whether a data set is incomplete. Now the User can be alerted or prevented from saving or submitting data when a breach is found, thereby enforcing the process!
Deployments
Deployments arrived in the new generation of Planning 8.2/8.3 to provide a mechanism to migrate the entire model design between environments. Now we can migrate our design changes from Test to Production following a straight-forward front-end process. This feature alone is reported to save some customers hundreds of man hours per annum.
<< NEW >> : IBM Cognos EP 8.4 is now available.
This is a ground breaking improvement to the Cognos EP End User experience.
This gives Cognos EP the same look and feel as Cognos BI.
New Features for the End User:
- Cognos BI Look and feel ........................................... < Demo >
- Sorting dimensions based on values ........................... < Demo >
- Drill on dimensions ................................................... < Demo >
- Hide selections.
- Freeze frames.
- Present input tab and result tab in one view ................ < Demo >
- Tailor the order of tabs.
- Tailor the orientation of tabs.
Many other features and improvements have been made to the modelling capability such as inserting Allocation Tables for Admin Links. In some cases this can eliminate entire Contributor models used as staging areas.
For more information on latest features please see our New Features Assessment workshop or contact us at info@eppractice.co.uk