Terminology used in Cognos Planning

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The model in Cognos Planning is build by using D-lists, D-Cubes.

What is a D-List?

It is a list of related items. Technically D-list is a one dimensional array. For example List of countries can be a D-List. By using D-Lists we create D-Cubes.

What is a D-Cube?

It is a multi dimensional array. For example...

Lets say a company want to analyse its products' sales in different countries from January to December. So we will have to create 3 D-Lists

1. Products- It will contain items like Keyboard, Mouse, Monitor (if company is of PC products)

2. Countries- It will contain list of countries like US, UK, Germany, Japan etc.

3. Time- It will have items from Jan to Dec.

Apart from the items necessary, we also include the items which help us doing aggregation. Countries can be aggregated to Continents, Time items can be aggregated to Quarters and Year. 

The values 

Values of normal items - can be taken from other D-List items, some formulae or can be entered as constant. We can also specify the format of the values.

Values of aggregated items - These values are generally calculated from the other items by applying formulae for example addition of items or percent (%), deviation etc.

What is an E-List?

E-List is a hierarchical D-List. A D-List with defined hierarchy. It contains tree like structure with parent and child nodes.

What is Cognos Planning

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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.

Planning for Cognos Planning

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I believe I’m lucky that I got a chance to work on Cognos Planning. It’s a great Business Intelligence tool. I am just amazed the way it works and the way it allows the functionality to the user.

 

There is a lot to learn on this tool. Now a days I’m working a lot on this. It helps organizations plan their businesses and make intelligent decisions. Organizations also use Cognos Reportnet to create reports for the senior level managers and CEOs.
 

You can really keep an eye on your business using it and most importantly, you can really measure your planning and can guess its outcome. Measured business decreases risks and gives a direction to the success. This is the main reason big businesses are adopting tools like these. 
 

The reason businesses are not adopting the tool real fast is that it costs a whole sum of money. You really need to invest a lot to get advantages from such tools. Apart from the licensing costs of the tool; the IT companies which develop applications (the front and back ends for the end users) charge a huge amount too. It also takes time to develop the applications.
 

I help small businesses making their business decisions by developing applications for them. Cutting costs on big IT companies would definitely help them adopt this tool and take their businesses to an another height.
 

I’m starting posts to explain the features of Cognos Planning and the way it works and helps.