Our latest offering, the ‘New Features Assessment’ is the perfect opportunity to quantify the benefit in upgrading to the latest version. As Cognos EP and Cognos BI now share a ‘foundation layer’ many of the BI concepts and components are available to the planning environment, thereby offering new functionality and process improvements.
We have found that even those customers already using Cognos EP 8.3 have not yet taken advantage of the new features as the traditional planning consultants are not yet conversant with the step change in the underlying technology.
The deliverable
Step 1 : Develop a process map of your existing models
Step 2 : Identify best-fit for the new features
Step 3 : Quantify savings/gains e.g.: publish can be reduced by x cells in a typical cycle
Step 4 : Quantify process enhancement e.g. users cannot submit an incomplete forecast or cannot exceed upper limit on travel budget.
Where appropriate, small demo models can be created to prove the concept e.g.: assigning tolerances/thresholds to the travel expenses per cost centre (e-list).
IBM Cognos EP 8.3 New Features
The key observations from 8.3 are as follows
Much tighter integration with Cognos series 8 BI from architecture perspective.
Contributor applications are accessed from the Cognos Connection portal so BI/Planning users access ‘Cognos’ from the same area.
Incremental Publish to dramatically reduce the time spent in publishing application data - only publish changed data.
Validation Rules to prevent user from submitting incomplete forecast/plan. These can also be used to manage over/under spend by applying tolerances per e-list.
Events Management to email reports to key user when all nodes have submitted forecast for example.
Deployments to ease the pain in migrating from DEV to LIVE – some customers believe this will save hundred’s of man hours per year.
FM Models as source for Contributor data loads – can now load relational data into Contributor without having to create text files first.
Duration of Assessment:
Depending on the scale of the subject area this would take minimum of two days to evaluate with another day for write up and additional questions. Therefore 3-5 days depending on scale.
<< 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 our New Features Assessment workshop contact us at info@eppractice.co.uk