Cognos Performance Applications

Overview

Ready-built reports, analysis, and metrics for key business functions and rapid ROI.

There are four Cognos Performance Applications and seven modules:

Cognos Performance Applications improve your performance

• Create a single version of the truth—pre-built data connectors improve data integrity, quality, and accuracy. Create a single version of the truth enterprise-wide, quickly and easily.
• Leverage best practices—data warehouse configures data to answer key questions based on best business practices. Get a complete view of your performance from summary through to detail, from any perspective, or across departments.
• Short time to results—rapid deployment gives you answers to key questions in the shortest time. Pre-built reports, analysis, and metrics provide quick wins and minimize impact on your infrastructure.

Product Highlights

• The reports, plans, and metrics that come with each module address your most important business questions, based on expert guidance from customers and other business and industry experts.
• Modules and their reports are interconnected, allowing you to investigate an issue in customer processes and link into your supply chain or financials as necessary.
• You can easily customize any of the pre-built reports and metrics in an application to suit your precise business requirements.
• You can pick one application and easily add another, or integrate the application with the other Cognos products.
• The software simplifies installation, configuration, loading data, and ongoing maintenance.
• The product architecture is ready to support any size deployment to large numbers of users.

Features and Benefits

• Each application was built starting with the key business questions per function, through to the answers, and then to source data.
• Business content was collected and validated through extensive interviews with consultants, professionals, and business veterans within Cognos Fortune 2000 clients.
• The deep understanding of business processes provides an analytic framework that can guide decision-makers:
• Monitor key metrics to identify issues or opportunities.
• Analyze the business for further insight and clarification of impact.
• Understand the details behind problems or opportunities to enable action.
• Hundreds of business metrics captured through hundreds of pre-packaged reports support the framework and big-picture view.
• Receive a unified business layer across all applications with an integrated enterprise data model. The result: a complete, holistic view of the business from both a functional and process view.

Extensible

• Performance Applications include the BI tools Cognos uses to build them.
• Extend the pre-built reports and metrics framework to capture unique information as a competitive advantage for your organization.
• Customizations and extensions can include:
• Additional data external to your ERP.
• Alternate sources of data and an open data warehouse model.
• New areas for analysis.
• Unique metrics for a particular vertical.
• New/changed reports and analyses.
• New BI pieces for new views into the content.

Production-ready architecture

• The Applications transform operational data from your ERP into analytic information.
• As the Applications transform the data, they add business value by calculating additional business metrics (for example, financial ratios and inventory counts) and key performance indicators that don't exist natively in your ERP.
• Both transaction and summary level data are stored in the data warehouse, letting you drill down and get the details.
• The software architecture, featuring the Performance Applications Console, simplifies installation, configuration, data loading, and ongoing maintenance
• The open data warehouse combined with Cognos BI delivers a design ready to support any size deployment.

Accelerated time to results

• All the steps for building analytics are complete, and are delivered out-of-the-box.
• You gain value and reduce the time required at every step: modeling the problem, preparing the data, analyzing and delivering insights.
• Pre-constructed extractions, a best-fit data model, and a superior business intelligence layer with packaged reports and analysis deliver the accelerated time to results.
• Performance Applications bring decision-makers and IT together for a fast path to solution, reducing the impact on resources and increasing confidence in the solution.