Wednesday, October 15, 2008

What is Cognos Planning


There is nothing fancy. Cognos Planning is a simple software which help organizations plan their business. It has mainly 3 parts.


1. Cognos Planning - Analyst

2. Cognos Planning - Contributor

3. Cognos Planning - Web Contributor



Cognos Planning - Analyst

It is used to build model of organization. During the model building all the related parts including offices in different countries, products, measurable properties (like profit, sales, profit % etc.), time (Jan, Feb etc) are taken into consideration.

These things are called dimensions in Cognos Planning.

Cognos Planning - Contributor

Once the model is build, Contributor is used to apply access permissions, running macros, showing/hiding the parts of model. Contributor’s full name is Contributor Administrator Console (CAC)

It can be used for various purposes. Models of Analyst are called Applications in Contributor after publishing from Analyst.

Cognos Planning - Web Contributor

It is a front end for the user. User see various pages in tabular format. They can enter data in those pages and cells. In web contributor there are 2 types of users.

1. Planner 2. Reviewer

Planners just enter data and submit the data for reviewer to review. There may be hierarchies of reviews and a user can be planner or reviewer or may be both.


All the data is entered by users and after reviewers approve the changes users made, the data is stored finally on the servers. That data can be used to generate various types of business reports.

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