Corporations have always sought to measure performance; however, traditional performance management methodologies have often failed to provide executives with accurate, meaningful and actionable data. Corporate Performance Management (CPM) takes a holistic approach to the implementation and monitoring of organizational strategy. Moreover, it is used to address three fundamental business questions:

• How are we doing?
   
• Why are we doing it?
   
• What should we be doing next?

CenterStone’s expertise in the deployment of Performance Management software can help your firm realize its CPM vision. Our strategic alliance with Cognos and our team of Cognos-certified, experienced professionals will transform the way you develop, implement, monitor and execute strategic plans. Our solutions will enable you to have a real-time understanding of where your organization is today, where it wants to go, what drivers should be set as critical success factors and how you can allocate resources to realize your chosen targets. Our proven engagement methodology is successful 100% of the time, providing CPM solutions for your business that add immediate value.

Read on to learn more about the Cognos solutions within the CPM umbrella.

Enterprise Planning

Spreadsheets have always been recognized as an effective personal productivity tool, but due to their “single user” functionality traits, they have never been an effective device for the deployment of an enterprise wide planning solution. Legacy spreadsheet-centric approaches to performance management can tell you what happened, but fail to address the most critical question when it comes to enterprise planning: What needs to happen in the future? Furthermore, a traditional spreadsheet approach to planning has distinct disadvantages:

• The lack of a centralized repository for the flow and aggregation of information dictates that version control is always an issue.
   
• There is no automated process for the aggregation of information across functional areas, so consolidation of related data is tedious and error-prone.
   
• Spreadsheets lack multi-dimensional functions that support driver-based planning, yet every business’ success criteria depends on specialized drivers.
   
• Any calculation error or omission extrapolates throughout the entire plan.

A Cognos Enterprise Planning solution and our consultants can help you move to an enterprise-wide, inter-related planning model that is driver-based. This solution addresses the weaknesses of a spreadsheet approach in six distinct ways:

• Visibility: With our server-based and fully integrated solution, your management team always knows who has ownership of each piece of the enterprise plan, and what actions they have taken. Functional areas no longer operate in silos. Their plans are immediately incorporated with all other plans, so you can view and measure progress across the enterprise.
   
• Forecast Drivers: Our Cognos solution gives you a driver-based, relational planning model that can link correlated items across functional areas. Sales planning and manufacturing can now be linked in a real time, centralized planning system.
   
• Centralized Control: Enterprise Planning offers a real-time status update and change control process to help you manage your planning initiatives. Simply put, spreadsheet- based planning offers no control over versioning or revisions to key metrics.
   
• Liability: Enterprise Planning provides you with a detailed report of all parties responsible for the ownership or revisions of each plan, so you no longer squander time debating who or where your numbers came from.
   
• Speed of Delivery: A typical plan cycle using spreadsheets takes 9 months and is immediately outdated. Enterprise Planning can deploy your driver-based plan in weeks while providing immediate forecast functionality.
   
• Collaboration: Enterprise Planning enables real-time sharing of information across functional areas through web-based collaboration, allowing your planning models to be deployed faster.

To learn more about Cognos Enterprise Planning, visit here

To view a product demonstration, view here
 

Enterprise Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence involves gathering, analyzing, storing and granting access to data to facilitate improved business decisions by enterprise users. Effective business intelligence turns data into strategic information that facilitates improved decision making at all levels of the enterprise. CenterStone can help you deploy the Cognos 8 BI product suite, allowing your organization to utilize the full spectrum of BI capabilities as outlined below.

As a recognized Cognos Platinum Partner, CenterStone can help you drive success and get the expected ROI from your Cognos BI investment. Cognos BI solutions are our focus and we are the best at implementing them.

Today the complexity and strategic importance of BI projects is increasing. Business and data challenges are compelling organizations to seek partners with proven methodologies and the ability to execute BI projects by taking a more strategic approach.

At CenterStone, we recognize the critical challenges inherent in implementing a BI solution. That is why we work closely with Cognos to make sure that your BI infrastructure assets and BI Competency Center are totally aligned with your business infrastructure, and you obtain fast and accurate information that enables effective decision making at all levels of the organization.

Cognos 8 Business Intelligence Solutions

o        Reporting

o        Analysis

o        Scorecarding

o        Dashboards

o        Event Management

o        Data Integration

To learn more about Cognos 8 Business Intelligence Products, visit here

To view a product demonstration, visit here

Cognos 8 BI Solutions

Reporting

"Standardizing on a single business intelligence (BI) reporting and analysis solution is a good idea …, as the results would be lower costs for developing and maintaining reports, greater consistency in the data surfaced by the reports, and lower risk of having multiple reports with contradictory information." – Forrester 2005 

Cognos 8 BI gives you one solution for your enterprise reporting needs, offering detailed, customizable reports with multilingual capabilities, support of various formats (Excel, PDF, XML, CSV, etc), and export targets (application integration, MS Office, etc.). These reporting functionalities are facilitated by a single, proven architecture used for viewing, sorting, analyzing and creating reports.

Additionally, the advanced customization capabilities allow for intuitive self-service report generation, with an adaptive, robust layout that automatically adjusts when you add or remove objects. The user- friendly report creation tools allow you to use drag and drop authoring to transpose data, incorporate multi-media objects such as charts, graphs, text, and images, all by using business terms familiar to you. You can even easily edit created reports with prompts and toolbar commands.

To learn more about Reporting solutions using Cognos 8 BI, visit here

To see a sample Report, visit here

To view a product demonstration, visit here
 

Analysis

“Organizations today collect enormous amounts of data from numerous sources. Retrieving, organizing, and analyzing this data with business intelligence (BI) can bring great value to a business. … Business intelligence allows executives to make informed business decisions with real-time data that can put a company ahead of its competitors." – Forrester 2006

The Cognos Analysis tools allow you to quickly address the “why” behind any business event, letting you know what is driving your business.  CenterStone can provide you with tools that provide the full spectrum of critical data, from high-level summarization right down to the granularity of individual operation details. The XML-based report format allows your reports to be opened in whatever familiar environment suits your needs. Best of all, the user-friendly functionality allows you to easily transpose, drill down, sort and rank the information to display the criteria that is important to you.

Cognos 8 BI allows you to explore and analyze large volumes of data with fast and predictable response times.

·         Analyze all data, using OLAP or dimensionally aware relational sources

·         Perform deep comparative analysis of business performance across multiple dimensions (time, product, customer, etc.)

·         Analyze large, complex data sets with an easy-to-use, drag-and drop user interface, pivoting, and filtering

To learn more about the Analytical capabilities of Cognos 8 BI, visit here

To see a sample Analysis Studio Report, visit here

To view a product demonstration, visit here

Scorecarding
 

“A balanced scorecard is not a dashboard, nor is it just another metrics program. It is a strategic measurement and management framework, and developing one requires significant effort and commitment.” – Forrester 2005

Scorecarding is not only an enhanced derivative of conventional reporting, it is a very effective management system. A Cognos scorecarding solution allows you to define and develop detailed reports using your own target metrics. Scorecarding gives you full spectrum reporting, from “at a glance” reports expressing a high-level overview of your performance to the “drill-down” reports that deliver granular detail to explain the “why” behind your performance.

A Scorecarding solution can enhance your performance management by:

• User-defined reporting: Instead of reviewing several different reports and trying to make sense of the data, you can immediately track your own operational performance based on objectives you identify
   
• Cross-functional reporting: Scorecarding data is interdependent – it reflects how one department’s performance affects another, leading to increased collaboration and cooperation across groups
   
• Accountability: Scorecarding provides your resources with visibility into your strategic vision, and allows them to take ownership of their performance
   
• Connectivity: Your strategy is expressed to all stakeholders in a “single version of the truth” through scorecarding
   

To learn more about Scorecarding using Cognos’ Metric Studio, visit here

To see a sample Dashboard, visit here

To view a product demonstration, visit here

Dashboards

“The failure of an incomplete, poorly considered dashboard initiative can harm the prospects of better-planned future corporate performance management efforts. Be prepared to explain to managers why it's not enough to "only want a dashboard.” – Gartner 2004

Business dashboards communicate complex information quickly. They translate information from your various corporate systems and data into visually rich presentations using gauges, maps, charts, and other graphical elements to show multiple results together.

Dashboards can enhance your performance management by:

• Providing one, simple version of business issues for an at-a-glance understanding and faster action
• Presenting a dynamic, real-world view of business with timely data refreshes
• Enabling drill-through to access other data sources and reports for more detail about what the dashboard shows you
• Uniting data from different core areas such as sales, marketing, finance, HR, logistics, and distribution so you can see a complete, multi-department picture
• Providing high-impact visuals that let users bring data to life in virtually any presentation type with interactivity, multiple 2D and 3D chart types, color-coded drillable maps, animated reports, and more
• Offering dashboard reports that are easy to use and require no custom coding
   

To learn more about Dashboard solutions using Cognos 8 BI, visit here

To see a sample Dashboard, visit here

To view a product demonstration, visit here

 

Business Event Management
 

The Cognos 8 BI suite includes event management that allows you to track critical, enterprise-wide events that require continuous monitoring. Using event conditions, you define event monitoring and the tasks used in conjunction to manage them, allowing you to ensure that the appropriate steps are taken throughout the cradle-to-grave event process. Alert-messaging functionality allows immediate notification to all issue owners when event-related decisions have been made or resolutions have been reached. Automated reports then allow you to track all ongoing events and their associated status during the workflow process.

Business Event Management using Event Studio can enhance your performance management by:

·         Monitoring operational systems to detect business process events

·         Setting alerts and deliver time-critical information to decision-makers across departments and locations

·         Reducing time-to-action and enabling fact-based issue resolution

·         Managing events throughout their lifecycle until they are resolved

To learn more about Business Event Management solutions using Cognos 8 BI, visit here
 

To see a sample Business Event Management solution, visit here
 

Data Integration

"Without a solid yet flexible data infrastructure, supported by best practices in data integration and data quality, optimal benefits from business intelligence will remain elusive." – Gartner 2005

Cognos data integration is an enterprise-wide ETL solution designed for high performance business intelligence. It optimizes data merging, extraction, transformation, and dimensional management to deliver data warehouses ready for business reporting and analysis.

With extract, transform, and load (ETL) capabilities from Cognos 8 Data Manager, CenterStone works with you to deliver a data warehouse ready for analysis and reporting.

·         Built on a dimensional framework to provide information based on the way business users think

·         Optimized for Cognos 8 BI capabilities

·         Lets you leverage and enhance your investments in third-party tools

Using the enterprise information integration (EII) capabilities from Cognos 8 and Composite Server, organizations can dynamically access and leverage all information, internal or external, no matter where the information resides in order to be more competitive.
 

·         New styles of reporting and analysis by combining historic data from warehouses with real-time operational information

·         Leverage a wide range of data sources including XML, JDBC, WSDL and LDAP — enabling a "single version of the truth" without moving or replicating data

To learn more about Data Integration solutions using Cognos 8 BI, visit here

To see a sample Business Event Management solution, visit here