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Business Reporting Software Tips
How Performance Intensive Is Your Business?
The book “The Performance Manager,” Mosimann, et al, cited work by the McKinsey Quarterly that identified three characteristics of business performance:
Transformational – activity involved with extracting/converting materials into finished goods.
Transactional – processing materials from basic form to applied products.
Tacit – procedural activities, such as retail sales or performing services, requiring tacit or experience for success.
Among the observations made regarding these interesting categories of business, the authors note that there have been more economic gains in tacit work activities.Is this possibly an effect of technology?Then they note that investment continues to be heavier in transactional activities.Is this a result of the decades old trend of shedding labor in favor of automation or off shoring?Finally, it is suggested that it was harder to sustain a competitive edge in both transactional and transformational business.Does this follow the adage of: if it’s easy to do, everyone does it?These observations seem to raise interesting indicators of how intensity of work performance can help classify your business.
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Cognos Tip: Business Reporting Software – Striving For A Common Foundation
Cognos.com Tip: The challenge to the community of BI vendors is how to connect the universe of disparate data and information to provide a common business view of your company’s operations. You’ve invested in tracking all of the salient transactions for sales, supply, manufacturing, and the like, yet how do you pull it together? A simplistic, though easily understood, analogy is found in the trusty spreadsheet. Old timers that started using Excel, Oracle, Lotus, or other similar software remember the early days when a sheet was just that set of information. Then came sheet linking and multi-dimensional spreadsheets. Business reporting software performs a similar function with all of your company’s sources of data, but on a much faster and larger scale. Selection of the proper business reporting software can reliably lead to more value from your data investment and permit you to take advantage of emerging business opportunities with the right data, appropriate refresh timeliness and delivery characteristics.
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Deploying Reporting Software
Deploying reporting or any other type of business intelligence software capability is a complex and difficult process that is often hard to standardize.Help in accomplishing this capability may come from a concept pioneered by the BI developer, Cognos.It is called the BI Competency Center and is based on three suppositions:
·The deployment must connect to senior management, users, and vendors.
·There must be adequate financial support from the CEO and CFO levels.
·Appropriate staffing must be provided by the CIO function.
In order for the deployment to be successful and lead to financial and performance gains, the following observations apply:
·The business reporting software must be used at every level of management.
·The functional business areas served must be data driven (retail, multi-site, or vertically integrated manufacturing are examples.)
·The functional engine must be provided from within the IT department.
·Corporate executives must be the ultimate users.
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Cognos Tip: Executive Dashboards
Cognos.com Tip: Are you a businessperson searching for ways to improve your company’s performance? One way is to turn to technology for assistance. Technology, in return, will lead the search to the set of applications often collectively referred to as business intelligence software. Included in these applications are sub-components such as, reporting software, OLAP software, or executive dashboards, to name a few. Executive dashboards are BI tools used by decision makers, like yourself, to visually monitor the state of the enterprise. The term derives from the analogy of the automobile dashboard, from which the operator (executive) can drive or operate the business. Use an executive dashboard to better manage your business and make vital decisions.
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Integrated BI Software And Data Access
One business intelligence vendor has characterized data access as potentially fragmented when viewed in a systems context.This is especially evident when tracking transactions across many functional business areas.The vendor goes on to point out that their system, Cognos 8, offers a powerful array of access hooks that may be useful to potential buyers of BI reporting software.They are:
·ETL – Extract, Transform, Load – Integrates data from multiple sources to a common repository location.
·EII – Enterprise Information Integration – connects to multiple disparate data sources in near real-time.
·Direct Access – If your organization has some rudimentary level of BI with some tools in place, this capability can provide seamless access.
·Common Metadata – Structures data regardless of source and format into a common foundation using rules, calculation, and filter technologies.
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Cognos Tip: Uncovering Billing Discrepancies Through Business Reporting Techniques In The Supply Chain
Cognos.com Tip: Meredith Levinson, in CIO Magazine, related the details of how a business intelligence software tool helped one company uncover a series of significant discrepancies between vendor’s negotiated prices and actual invoices. The company in question, a Texas-based restaurant operator, used a business reporting tool from Cognos to analyze the contractually-guaranteed food supply prices to actual prices charged in the vendor’s invoices. She reported that the software “parses all of the company’s invoices from suppliers and contracts with food vendors … to see if any of the vendors are actually charging … a higher rate than the chain had negotiated.” The operator enjoyed a $200,000 savings by correcting these discrepancies and better selecting suppliers through use of technological means.
If you have a supply chain that you think needs to be re-evaluated, consider a business reporting tool to uncover discrepancies in your billing.
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Comparing BI Terminology – One Example
When shopping for a BI software suite or just to give your company an entry-level capability, be conscious of the trends and differences in key terminology between vendors.
Information Builders, in their WebFOCUS product describes the following capabilities:
·Reporting – Web and browser based tools that provide executives, analysts, customers, and partners to rapidly create rich, formatted reports from enterprise data.
·Query and Analysis – Providing the functionality of query tools, reporting tools, and OLAP into one solution.
·Visualization – Visual Discovery allows in-depth intuitive analysis from any enterprise data source.
·Transaction Systems – Maintain is a high performance solution for building and deploying BI to concurrent users.
Comparatively, Cognos, and its Cognos 8 product describes:
·Reporting – Web services-based tools that report against all operational systems, OLAP, and relational data sources.
·Analysis – Explore and analyze information from OLAP or dimensionally aware, relational sources using drag and drop, comparative or predictive techniques.
·Scorecarding – Link initiatives and projects to strategy and metrics.
·Dashboards – Web-based at-a-glance sna
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Cognos Tip: OLAP Software
Cognos.com Tip: If you're looking for OLAP software to improve your business, look for software that is easy to use. For instance, OLAP software that is on a single-server with a common format will provide ease of use. Not sure if all your employees will be able to use the software? Find a vendor who provides OLAP software, such as Cognos, with a user-friendly interface so all users, regardless of their level, can use the technology.
If your company plans on investing in OLAP software, consider a well-known business reporting vendor, such as Cognos.
