The most popular method of information gathering in corporations today is through ERP software. An ERP solution is a powerful, but complex set of sophisticated programs designed to gather information from the daily operational activities of your business. In a typical company, mundane but essential tasks such as accounts receivable collections, supplier payments, payroll, invoicing, etc. are performed every day by members of the...

IBM Cognos Analytics empowers business users to bring in any external data together with Cognos managed data for greater insight and agility.  A common business use case would be to bring in your monthly sales targets for each sales person. Here is the scenario – You would like to create a simple Sales versus Targets report by salesperson, however, you do not have your sales targets data in your system.  Sales targets are only...

Many businesses inundated with data tend to tough it out with inadequate analysis tools because they are not aware of how or why business intelligence (BI) solutions can provide value. This article will cover the various ways BI and analytics in general can take your business to the next level and when the right time is to seriously consider implementing an analytics solution. There are many definitions of BI, simply put, it describes...

Business Intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW) are separate entities serving distinct functions in organizations. The data warehouse, representing the enterprise information architecture, serving to achieve a “single version of the truth”, is still necessary today to support the user-facing BI system in the DW/BI solution.  Perhaps once operational systems can be completely standardized, reduced to simply transactional data...

Budgeting and financial forecasting are critical planning and management disciplines that provide invaluable aid to business managers in the decision-making process. Most companies have business plans in varying forms of sophistication and use, that provide points of comparison to gauge success. Capital and operational funding, whether by personal capital investment, financial loans or some combination of the two is required to drive...

IBM Cognos Analytics 11 is a new platform with rich capabilities which IBM has stated will be rolled out incrementally via its quarterly updates. The Cognos 11 UI has changed dramatically from Cognos 10.  In many ways, this is a change in the right direction.  However, there are some nice and usable features that we had in the Cognos 10 UI not yet available in Cognos 11. One of them is the capability of retrieving the URL of a report....