Ten easy steps to using external information to analyze target sales in IBM Cognos Analytics

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...

Trusting your reporting data – Part 2

Trusting your reporting data – Part 2

Rarely, is the truth in plain sight.  When faced with disparate systems, applications, or sources, gathering the data in a single place is only half the battle. The second half of the equation is putting in place a stringent set of data standards that would enable users to slice and dice data in whatever context they need it.  Creating a database that provides a holistic view of all relevant domains and focusing on information content...

Trusting your reporting data

Trusting your reporting data

Financial forecasting and Business Intelligence (BI) analytic tools provide business users with a single data source. All “actual” information is derived from the company’s proprietary Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, automatically updated to a single DataMart at user-defined intervals for use by all reporting tools. All forecasts created in a budgeting and forecasting solution are “written back” to the DataMart, to then be...