IBM COGNOS

 
 

Performance Management

People + Technology for Your Best Decisions

Good decisions are the building blocks of great business performance. The performance management system from IBM integrates software, services, best practices, and partners.

The result - a common understanding and accountable actions based on answers to your performance management questions:

  • How are we doing?
    Measuring and monitoring performance with scorecards and dashboards tracks your key metrics.
  • Why?
    Reporting and analysis let you see data, gain context, understand trends, and spot anomalies.
  •  What should we be doing?
    Planning, budgeting, and forecasting let you set and share a reliable view of the future.

 

Many factors influence your company's performance. But few areas under your management are more important than your organization's decision-making ability.

Getting answers and acting on them means integrating reporting and analysis, planning, and measuring and monitoring--across your organization. This integrated approach is the IBM COGNOS performance management system.

By integrating information, technology, and people, your decision-makers can become performance managers. Performance managers look at metrics, plans and reports in their functional area to make the best possible decisions.

They also use this same approach to connect with others. For example, if Marketing decisions improve demand, then Sales and Operations needs to know to ensure the supply is ready.

In this way your good decisions cause other good decisions. The end result is better alignment, accountability, and performance.

Reporting

Reporting gives you access to a complete list of self-serve report types, is adaptable to any data source, and operates from a single metadata layer for a variety of benefits such as multilingual reporting.

with the reporting capability, you can personalize the style and quality of BI delivered to your key stakeholders; and you expand the community of BI users.

New Features in Version 8.4

  • Increased visual appeal includes new background designs and colors. Users can add gradient colors behind charts.
  • New chart types: Merimekko, Stepline, Sparkline, Sparkbar, Spark Win/Loss.
  • Report annotations: Users can add comments directly within the body of HTML-rendered reports.
  • Enhanced suppression: Suppress all types of reports against relational, dimensionally-modeled relational, and OLAP sources. Also, users can suppress rows, columns, or rows and columns based on "zero" values, "divide by zero" values, missing values, and overflow values.
  • Extended filters now include wildcards, range, and between operations.
  • Associated frames now drill together.
  • Strategy Maps and Impact Diagrams now available as portlets that can be integrated into IBM COGNOS Connection, IBM WebSphere, and MS SharePoint portals.
  • Data lineage: Users can access and view major transformations to data as it moves through the system.
  • Expanded data access: Use data from IBM COGNOS Now! and IBM COGNOS TM1.

More Targeted Information

  • Use tabbed portlet pages to navigate across multi-style, multi-page reports with critical information.
  • Use briefing books to maximize your professional report presentation with customized page orientation, horizontal pagination, multiple tables of content, and personalized 'no data' scenarios.
  • Schedule and burst multi-page reports to ensure that stakeholders receive relevant, consistent, and timely information.
  • Save and store reports to any LAN location to save time, increase convenience, and facilitate easy access to reports and information.
  • Use global filters to update the content across multiple objects in a portal page.

More User Communities

Allow business analysts to quickly and intuitively create and format statement-style reports with live data with the express authoring mode.

Complete Reporting Coverage

  • User interface supports 10+ languages; reports delivered in 25+ languages.

  • Multiple export formats: Excel, PDF, XML, HTML, and CSV.

  • Flexible distribution methods: centralized access, email, application integration, and Office.

  • A single architecture for viewing, querying, analyzing, and authoring for collaborative contributions to any report including dashboards.

  • Report against any heterogeneous data source.

  • Web-based deployment.

Advanced Authoring Capabilities

  • Intuitive and accessible self-service report authoring.

  • Federated queries.

  • Adaptive layout adjusts automatically when objects are added, moved, or removed.

  • Embed live applications, Web sites, and non-BI content within a report.

  • Drag-and-drop authoring incorporates data, text, charts, graphs, and images.

  • Edit reports with prompts and toolbar commands.

  • Interactive visualizations and charting abilities.

  • Work with data using familiar business terms.

  • Use a variety of charts: crosstabs, bar/3D bar, pie/doughnut, line, gauge, funnel, scatter, dot density, waterfall, and more.

  • Create complex, multi-page layouts using different data sources without programming or workarounds.

  • Conditional suppression and automatic calculations.

IBM COGNOS 8 Planning

Optimized for high-participation planning within a structured workflow.

If you need:

  • Input from hundreds, or even thousands, of cost-center managers
  • Centrally controlled, auditable, transparent workflow
  • Driver-based planning, budgeting, and forecasting

IBM COGNOS TM1

Allows you to consolidate, view, and edit huge volumes of multidimensional data within large, complex hierarchies.

If you need:

  • Real-time analytics for profitability, sales mix, and price/volume variance
  • Interactive, rules-based business modeling
  • Flexible rolling forecasts to make your company more agile
channel partner marketing.

Channel Marketing ROI

Measuring channel partner marketing effectiveness enables the channel manager to recruit better channel partners, manage and refer leads more effectively, and maximize channel marketing ROI. With channel sales analytics on hand, the channel manager always has the facts on where to invest next in the channel marketing program.

Experience and Tools

Blackstone & Cullen has the experience, tools, and focus on measuring and maximizing through-channel partner marketing effectiveness, from end to end. Where competitors offer small components like portals, analytical tools, or scorecards, BAC offers a complete understanding of the end-to-end vision needed to help you measure and improve your channel marketing program.