Cognos Solutions for SAP

Overview

"Ventana Research believes that organizations should build a specific BI strategy that is independent of their application server and transaction applications like ERP, SCM and CRM to minimize the risk of project delays and time to providing access to critical business information across the enterprise." — Mark Smith, CEO and EVP Research, Ventana Research, "Oracle Re-Enters BI Market Seeking Leadership Position," April 2006.

Five ways to extend the value of your investments
in SAP applications

Organizations are continually articulating their objectives of enabling better management of business performance supported by increasing user adoption of core BI and Planning solutions while also managing complexity of their IT environments.

To that end, here are the top ways that Cognos customers are finding value by extending their SAP applications with Cognos for business intelligence and performance management requirements on SAP R/3 and SAP NetWeaver (including SAP BW).

Available and Proven

Customers value the immediate availability of Cognos BI and Performance Management capabilities on their existing implementations of SAP applications. No wait times for availability and the experience their users have, reflecting over 15 years of evolution from customer input, has increased the overall value and appeal of working with Cognos to extend the value built into organization's SAP applications.

The result is a faster time to a reliable solution from the market leader in business intelligence and performance management. You can leverage the breadth of Cognos extended capabilities now.

Self-service authoring for executives and everyday users

A core design principle for all Cognos solutions is to enable broad user adoption through easy-to-use, self-service interfaces for business users. This reflects a need for faster turnaround on BI and performance management requirements and a need for flexibility, enabling business users to respond immediately to market or business changes.

The parallel to enabling business users is off-loading IT effort and removing the requirement to pre-think and pre-build all BI and plans before distributing the results to the end user. The result is increased user adoption, increased productivity for BI , and performance management authoring, and more strategic use of IT investments, including SAP applications.

SAP version-independent (SAP NetWeaver, SAP R/3)

Cognos solutions are deeply integrated with the SAP NetWeaver platform and SAP R/3 to ensure that your investments in SAP applications can be leveraged with the extended capabilities from Cognos. However, many organizations are not on the current version of SAP R/3 or the NetWeaver platform or may have multiple instances and potentially multiple versions in place. All can be leveraged at once by Cognos, without requiring you to be on the most current version or even a single instance.

This version and platform independence means your SAP application upgrade plans are not impacted by and do not impact your performance management solution from Cognos. This is appropriate for companies that have or desire longer times between ERP and platform upgrades, enabling you to leverage your investments longer between times where additional cost, risk and effort are introduced by potentially lengthy upgrade projects. The result is that Cognos is integrated with SAP application investments, but independent for flexibility and to reduce project/solution risk.

Adaptable for heterogeneous and changing IT landscapes

Many organizations have organically grown adopting new standards along the way or rapidly grown through acquisitions or had decentralized IT organizations across divisions which has resulted in mixed IT environments including data, applications, security, and more.

Another core design principle built into Cognos solutions is to take advantage of your existing heterogeneous environments and insulate users by adapting to changes as you evolve, simplify or standardize your IT environment. As a result, your performance management solution from Cognos will leverage your existing SAP and non-SAP data, infrastructure and skills, providing greater returns on that investment. The built-in adaptability will protect your performance management solution for the future as your IT environment changes. This flexibility will enable you to reduce the number of overlapping tools typically used for parts of the performance management solution, typically in silos, enabling standardization on Cognos.

A complete performance management solution

Cognos has been recognized as the market leader in BI and performance management software. We provide the breadth of capability organizations desire and the depth of functionality they require across business intelligence and enterprise planning, across all sources and platforms.

Cognos 8 BI provides extended capabilities across querying, reporting, Dashboarding, Scorecarding, event management, and more, in a single product on a single architecture. The Cognos 8 Report Pack for mySAP FI/CO provides an extended capability to quickly enable reporting, Scorecarding and Dashboarding on SAP R/3 as a compliment to Cognos 8 BI on SAP BW.

Cognos Planning provides broad planning and budgeting capabilities, owned by the business team to drive more effective performance management. This breadth and depth of capability are recognized as leading the market individually and as a complete performance management solution. This leadership reflects more than 15 years focused on customer and market requirements for business intelligence and performance management.

Cognos performance management solutions provide extended capabilities for organizations that have SAP R/3 and SAP NetWeaver. 

SAP version-independent (SAP NetWeaver, SAP R/3)

Cognos 8 BI can combine data from across multiple versions and instances of SAP R/3 and SAP BW in a single report, scorecard, or dashboard with your non-SAP data. While deeply integrated into SAP NetWeaver and SAP R/3, customers can expand and upgrade Cognos BI capabilities independently from SAP R/3 and SAP NetWeaver platform versions.

SAP customers who are not on the most current versions of SAP applications, can gain the benefit of market leading Business Intelligence capabilities. Users are also insulated from SAP BW or SAP R/3 upgrade plans. The result is that Cognos 8 BI is integrated with SAP application investments, but independent for flexibility and to reduce project/solution risk.

Adaptable for heterogeneous and changing IT landscapes

Most companies have multiple and heterogeneous data sources, applications, security, and more. Cognos 8 BI has a single, Web Services-based SOA architecture which enables us to leverage mixed IT environments and adapt as environments change over time – insulating users in the process.

• Provide everyone across your organization with a single, trusted source for information.
• Eliminate the management and maintenance of duplicate services such as security.
• Centralized metadata model lets you apply consistent business rules, calculations, and dimensions to your data.

The Cognos 8 BI architecture enables users to see a single view of their business through a single, centralized metadata model across all sources of data – SAP And non-SAP – enabling a single view of the company. All BI capabilities leverage a single query engine ensuring exactly the same information and business rules are applied regardless of how users are viewing and interacting with the data.

Users can combine data from across sources in a single report or dashboard, calculate values across sources – combining transaction information from R/3 with historical information in a data warehouse such as SAP BW. Or calculating a variance between actuals from SAP BW and targets or plans in a DB2 data warehouse. Or getting a complete picture of sales by adding sales data from an SAP BW instance in Europe with sales data from another SAP BW instance in North America. Or simply calculating revenue by headcount where revenue is from the Sales InfoCube and headcount is from an HR InfoCube – without a MultiProvider.

The 100% zero-footprint UI means no client side administration for BI authoring, access or distribution. Simplifying IT efforts. As a result, your BI solution from Cognos will leverage your existing SAP and non-SAP data, infrastructure and skills, providing greater returns on that investment. The built-in adaptability will protect your BI solution for the future as your IT environment changes.

Cognos 8 ReportPack for mySAP FI/CO

Overview

Bring easy, self-service R/3 reporting to your business users

Extend the value of your current enterprise investments by providing business users, for the first time, the ability to combine in one report or dashboard, historic data from the SAP BW with current data in mySAP without additional coding:

• Achieve the most complete view of enterprise performance while eliminating costs and effort required for separate operational reporting projects.
• Deliver pre-defined content for more than 60 commonly used reports to provide immediate access to mySAP data within a business context.
• The Cognos Data Adapter provides one-click connectivity into mySAP, delivering secure and trusted pathways to build additional reports. The Cognos 8 Report Packs and Cognos Data Adapter extend underlying functionality provided by Composite Software.

• Reports with robust formatting are available out-of-the box. They can be easily customized or extended to new reports without the need for additional coding.
• Pre-built reports accelerate the delivery of operational information.
• Reuse existing business intelligence authoring skills.
• Leverage Cognos 8 Report Pack reports to quickly deliver dashboards and other BI content.

Save money

• Using Cognos 8 Report Packs is a cost-effective way to provide insight based upon valuable SAP data across your entire organization.
• Eliminate the cost and effort of creating a separate operational reporting environment.
• No additional training for end users.
• No redundant development and maintenance, no separate environment to administer.

Deliver results

• Cognos 8 Report Packs provide immediate operational reporting from your mission-critical SAP transaction applications.
• Deliver up-to-the-minute dashboards using data from operational systems and data warehouses.
• Provide complete, up-to-the-minute insights into business performance.
• Build reports using data not yet loaded into the data warehouse.
• Build dashboards that combine historical data from a data warehouse with current data from operational systems.

Usage

Cognos 8 Report Packs are an ideal way to distribute SAP data to all your users and decision-makers, in a shorter time than can be done building SAP reports alone. They are also ideal for users who:

• Desire a single source of BI, regardless of the data source.
• Find standard SAP reports restrictive or inflexible.
• Need to combine SAP data with other data sources.
• Need to see current and historical data about customers.
• Need to reconcile data from other systems.
• Need to supplement BI on the data warehouse with up-to-the-minute information.

Cognos 8 Report Packs can also have an immediate impact on a wide range of projects. Examples include:

• Operational Reports: front-line workers need current information to make day-to-day decisions.
• On-demand information from packaged applications delivers the insights they need.
• Up-to-the-Minute Dashboards: use Cognos 8 Report Packs to improve visibility into performance and drive better decisions.
• Provide users with the complete picture of a key process that draws data from different systems: For example: shipping managers can view order status, current inventory levels, expected receipt of goods, and closed orders within a single dashboard.
• Single View of a Customer: Cognos 8 Report Packs provide on-demand data aggregation and history about a given customer across packaged applications and other sources to enable different views from a consistent data source. Let your sales team see a customer's complete purchasing history, including historical and current transactions – to help them continue selling value-added products or services.

Enterprise Planning for SAP

Overview

Drive better business performance

Cognos 8 Planning is the only proven and scalable enterprise planning solution to provide sensible client processing, proper bandwidth consumption, and appropriate server resource usage.

Cognos 8 Planning is the only enterprise planning solution that: 

• Is purpose-built for the unique requirements of business planning.
• Fully leverages and extends the immense business value of SAP.
• "Frees" finance from a reliance on actuals and dependence on specialists for making changes to business models, hierarchies, and rules.

Boost your forward-looking capabilities

Cognos Planning is built on a deep understanding of how frequently and how quickly finance must be able to make changes to its planning models in a large, diverse organization:

• Enable frequent contributions regarding performance against plan by hundreds or thousands of front-line employees so finance has access to the most current intelligence about expected results.
• Place ownership of business models and rules in the hands of finance. Finance personnel can change structures and underlying assumptions quickly and easily without dependence on IT and the delays that such dependence implies.

Meet deadlines and calculation requirements

SAP applications were designed to optimize the steady and continuous collection of data across the enterprise to streamline operations. Planning, by comparison, is characterized by sudden peaks in participation and system usage:

• Cognos Planning uses an intelligent distributed architecture that downloads a small calculation engine onto the user's PC the first time they access the system via Web browser.
• Persistent local calculation engine harnesses processing power in the desktop browser for local calculations, providing unprecedented scalability.

Increase participation, reduce detail

One of the strengths of SAP is its ability to collect, collate, and present information on a massive scale. One result is that the planning process becomes crippled by the amount of information incorporated into plans and forecasts:

• Cognos Planning is a driver-based solution. Contributors input data in terms that are relevant to them (units sold, hours worked, trips planned) while the software calculates the effects based on underlying assumptions that are modeled by finance.

Once the assumptions behind plans and forecasts are more visible, one can examine and challenge the assumptions, rather than the raw data, leading