One of the most common misconceptions that we hear when speaking to prospective customers is that they do not need a reporting solution because they already have an ERP system in place.  Or, their organization has just moved to a new ERP system and they have expectations (that are somewhat misguided) that the built-in reporting capabilities that come with their new ERP will take care of all of their reporting needs, therefore avoiding...

IBM released its newest version of Cognos Analytics 11.1.3 in July of this summer (see our press release).  The new release includes enhancements to reporting, authoring, dashboarding, data exploration, and its natural language AI assistant, all with the goal of making it easier for non-specialist users to take advantage of self-service business analytics.  Some of the new enhancements to the report authoring capabilities in R3 of...

After working with SAP Business One customers over the years and helping them with their reporting and dashboarding needs with our SAP B1 QuickStart, we have been able to grow our solution to 11 modules, with the most recently added one being “Delivery” – see our press release.  By analyzing our customers’ processes, we are constantly coming up with additional ways to help optimize their reporting automation. How did our new...

In our last blog, we explained what dashboards are and the purpose of a dashboard for visualization.  As a continuation on the topic of dashboards, here is an outline of how easy it is for business users, even those who are new to analytics software and have had no prior training. To build a dashboard in IBM Cognos Analytics, you start off by going into the Cognos portal.  At the bottom left of your screen, you will see a ‘New’ button...

Many small-to-medium businesses we speak to initially think they don’t ‘need’ dashboarding an tend to feel that it would be a ‘nice-to-have.  These companies typically don’t think of dashboarding as something worth investing time and money in.  Some of these companies tend to focus more on reporting and do use tools like Excel to extract and report on their data.  However, these businesses seem to place little importance on...