BI Source uses Cognos's idea of the performance management system to integrate our customers' software, services, best practices, and partners to give a common understanding and accountable actions based on answers to these performance management questions:
- How are we doing? - Measuring and Monitoring
- Measure how you perform against targets and hold people accountable for them.
- See trends and changes in operational and financial metrics.
- Comply with regulations such as IFRS and Sarbanes-Oxley.
- Why? - Reporting and Analysis
- Align the organization with a shared, single version of the truth.
- Place information in context, find trends, and spot variations, risks, and opportunites.
- Understand the 'why?' behind your results and trends.
- What should we be doing? - Planning
- Create plans and budgets that connect, unlike spreadsheet-based systems.
- Adapt plans organization-wide as business conditions change.
- Engage departments ouside of Finance in the planning process for greater accuracy and buy-in.
Measuring ang Monitoring
BI Source utilizes Cognos scorecards, dashboards, and financial consolidation software to help our customers answer the important question, How are we doing?
- Scorecards
- Deliver at-a-glance information that show you immediately how the company performs against targets you set.
- Communicate strategy and targets to show everyone what's important, what's expected, and how you're doing.
- Connect different departments to see how each department's metric affects others.
- Dashboards
- Translate complex information into high-impact presentations using gauges, maps, charts, and other graphical elements.
- See changes to gain a dynamic view of business conditions with timely, refreshed data.
- Understand what's behind the picture by drilling through maps for more detail.
- Unite data from different departments for the complete picture.
- Financial Consolidation
- Consolidate multiple diverse ledgers into a single, common chart-of-accounts structure.
- Add pre-built rules and calculations to populate plans or scorecards.
- Manage complex business models - Multinationals can evaluate financial results across countries, currencies, and legal entities.
Reporting and Analysis
BI Source utilized Cognos reporting and analysis software to answer the business performance question of Why? Reporting lets you author and distribute every report type: high-volume production reports, individual ad hoc queries, widely distributed business reports, and more. Analyzing lets you explore information from a variety of dimensions.
- Reporting
- Gain alignment with a single version of the truth. Common data definitions means you spend less time debating the numbers and more time deciding what to do.
- Connect all data sources by authoring your own customized reports across multiple data sources.
- Timely reports and self-service reporting give you the information you need, when you need it in order to make the right decisions faster.
- Deliver information over the web, on mobile devices, through common interfaces like MS Office to meet the needs of all business users.
- Analysis
- Get the answers and detail that you need, see information by department, by region, by product, and more. Drill down from a summary to transaction-level detail.
- Find trends - See changes year over year, month to month, or any other way you want your data modeled.
- Find trends - See changes year over year, month to month, or any other way you want your data modeled.
- All users can view relationships in your data and change displays with ease.
Planning
BI Source can help your company answer What Should we be doing? by translating your strategies and objectives into plans, budgets, and forecasts. We can build dynamic, interconnected models for better visibility and control over your performance.
- Planning, budgeting and forecasting
- Develop your clear-cut strategy and allocate the resources to achieve it.
- Coordinate operational and financial plans for better reliability. Link your financial projections with the sales, headcount, expense, and capital expenditure plans that underpin them.
- Provide real-time feedback for your planning process, across departments, functions, and geographies.
- Adjust your targets, plans and resource allocations. As conditions change, adapt driver-based plans and rolling forecasts.
Additional Information
To learn more about Business Intelligence with BI Source and Cognos, please review these white papers and other literature.
The Full Promise of Business Intelligence
- Explains how the Cognos software brings all your people and systems together for simple, complete, and proven BI.
Scorecarding with Cognos 8 Business Intelligence
- In-depth detail showing how to use Cognos scorecarding for monitoring and measuring performance of an enterprise.
Business Analytics: The Perfect Fit for the Agile Enterprise
- Are you on the road to agility? Check your current business analytics system against the new generation of business analytics tools.
Extending BI with Dashboards: Introducing Cognos 8 Go! Dashboard
- Cognos solutions offer the full range of dashboards — operational, tactical, and strategic — to help you monitor, measure and manage corporate performance. As part of the newest version of its performance management platform, a new dashboard application — Cognos 8 Go! Dashboard — has been added to the Cognos 8 Go! family of business intelligence (BI) extensions.
