Steve Ladd is a Certified Cognos Planning Solution Designer, and a Senior Consultant with a performance management consulting firm. He has 10 years of technology experience, with a focus on performance management systems.
Steve is a seasoned (PMP certified) project manager who has led the development of a diverse set of software solutions including financial planning, financial reporting, and business intelligence systems. His experience includes working with accounting, finance, operations, and IT in multiple industries, including retail, insurance, and healthcare. His technical proficiencies include web development, ETL design, and OLAP data modeling.
Steve lives in Austin, Texas with his wife Marisa and son Tyson. He is available for consulting work and may be contacted at <[email protected]>.
Sascha Mertens graduated from German University for Applied Sciences (HS Niederrhein) in 2001 as an engineer of Economics. Focusing on the business part of his degree, he began to work with Corporate Performance Management (CPM) topics in his thesis on 'Redesign of a controlling system by means of a Management Information System (MIS).'
When he started working at Deloitte in 2001, he was trained and certified in Analyst and Contributor by Adaytum—the original software producer—before they were acquired by Cognos and subsequently by IBM. With his gained knowledge, Sascha started working for the first German planning project with Volkswagen Financial Services AG, which was brought up to a status that is still live today. While this project was realized on a nearly full Analyst model with several thousand Analyst objects storing actual and plan data, he proceeded to grow himself with Cognos Planning and its development in the direction of web technology.
Once Sascha encountered the magic and the fun of translating the business requirements of CFOs and CIOs into powerful, full-blown, and integrated information systems, he continued to contribute his knowledge to many different projects. Through the modeling of system designs and architectural concepts, as well as their implementations into CPM systems, Sascha developed all kinds of planning models, such as sales planning, cost planning, personnel planning, and so on, up to the resulting financial plans.
Working closely with Cognos, Sascha became a beta tester for several upcoming Planning releases, and a community leader in one of the leading Cognos Planning forums on the Internet. With a deep knowledge of the system internals, he developed his own documentation tool for Cognos Planning systems which connects an interactive online documentation of an IBM Cognos Analyst to IBM Cognos Connection, and this is now used by a wide variety of his clients. With a strong focus on the conceptual and business side, he conducted a study for the 'State of planning within German companies' (Standortbestimmung zur Planung in deutschen Unternehmen) and offered various public webcasts, such as 'planning scenarios and simulations on board level', 'business planning for health insurance companies', 'decentralized sales planning within the franchise industry', and 'driver-based planning within a fleet management company'.
During his time with Deloitte, Sascha progressed his way to a senior managing level and designed and implemented Cognos Planning on a full-time basis in over 15 Cognos Planning and BI projects nationally, in Europe, and overseas, in the last six years. These covered nearly all kinds of industries with a concentration in the financial, biotech, and manufacturing industry and the public sector, spanning IT systems from a single server environment to huge service infrastructures holding more than 30 Planning servers that deliver services to more than 100 financial institutes. In 2006 and 2007, he designed and modeled Cognos Planning for the Austrian ministry of finance and implemented a planning system that was capable of planning the national budget of the whole country.
Since 2008, Sascha has worked for Conunit, a consulting firm specializing in CPM and BI solutions and the 'Cognos Partner of the year 2008 for Germany and Europe'. Within Conunit, Sascha and his team continue the Cognos Planning story with an offering of all kind of services around the IBM Cognos CPM and BI products, including full-scope projects (concept, design and implementation), version upgrades and their migrations, as well as performance enhancements and system improvement checks.