Book Image

IBM Cognos 8 Planning

Book Image

IBM Cognos 8 Planning

Overview of this book

Business planning is no longer just about defining goals, identifying critical issues, and then mapping out strategies. In today's dynamic and highly competitive business environment, companies with complex business models want their abstract strategies turned into discrete, executable plans. They want information from the field to reach decision makers in real-time so that they can fine-tune their plans as events unfold. IBM Cognos 8 Planning offers just that. This book provides you with everything you need to know for building planning models using IBM Cognos 8 Planning. After reading this book, you can begin your journey into model building bringing with you a perspective that comes from three of the most seasoned IBM Cognos Planning consultants in the business. In this book, you will learn how to build planning models using IBM Cognos Planning's modeling tool, Analyst. We introduce you to key objects in Analyst that let you define, store, and move data. Then we show how you can deploy the model to hundreds or thousands of users using IBM Cognos Planning's web-based tool, Contributor. We demonstrate some of the things you can do as an administrator and as a user. Finally, we show the automation tools that you can use to maintain and support your models. As we go through this, we will share with you tips and tricks and insights from our experience with real implementations.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
IBM Cognos 8 Planning
Credits
About the Authors
Acknowledgment
About the Reviewers
Preface
5
Defining Data Structures: D-List
Index

Summary


In this chapter, we discussed the Model Development Process. Initially, we talked about the key factors that you need to watch out for, before designing and building the IBM Cognos Planning model.

We devoted the rest of the chapter to discussing the key Model Development Process, and the following steps were carried out:

  • We explained the designing of the Analyst model, the importance of model flowcharting, the concepts of dimensions, datastores, data flow, and the principles of good Analyst model design

  • We described the steps needed to create the Contributor application from the Analyst model

  • We saw how the business users will enter and review the Contributor application

  • We talked about the publishing process, and how to use Contributor planning data for analysis and reporting using IBM Cognos BI tools

  • We discussed the maintenance of planning models and reports

In the next chapter, we will discuss the Analyst user interface and the key Analyst model building objects: D-Lists, D-Cubes, D...