Cognos 8 Business Intelligence

Value for Business: Work with Information Your Way

Stay connected to your business

Create and receive managed reports, scorecards, alerts, or other information about your performance. See what’s happening now.

• Regular reports on revenue, profitability, expenses, budget; headcount and compensation; inventory status and turn; supplier costs and delivery; marketing program effectiveness; manufacturing times and defects; and more.
• Scorecards with metrics such as product sales against target, number of new customers, customer satisfaction, customer retention, days sales outstanding, production efficiency.
• Dashboards that combine multiple metrics and reports. Get a marketing dashboard with number of leads generated, sales pipeline shown as a map, campaign costs against estimates, a gauge with costs per lead. Or a manufacturing dashboard with a gauge for units produced per time period, production line downtime, order levels by major customers, defects, and more.
• Alerts to let you know when delivery times exceed targets for major customers, when large deals slip from the pipeline, or when defects hit a certain level. 
   

Find answers to your questions

Regularly delivered reports may not provide all the answers for every business user. Some actually lead to new questions. You may need the ability to build your own reports and queries as required, preferably in a self-service way, so you don’t wait for information.

• A sales scorecard metric turns yellow. You can access the regular reports that underpin it. But you may want to also find out the best customers for that region and if they’ve changed quarter over quarter.
• A report on customer satisfaction shows on-time delivery trending down. You want to find out which suppliers are the most reliable.
• As you plan for growth, you need to determine the skill sets your team currently has and identify gaps you’ll need to fill.
• You’re alerted that your contract with a major customer is up for renewal next quarter. You need the reports on all activity with them to make sure there are no surprises. 
   

Explore trends with deep comparative analysis

Complementing reports and queries, you need the ability to conduct your own analysis of business performance. If reporting is finding the needle in the haystack; analysis is the way to find the next haystack. Analysis lets you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your business operations by giving you multiple perspectives on your performance.

You can use analysis to spot trends, find anomalies (both threats and opportunities), and compare time periods or other business elements (products, geographies, customers, and more).