IBM Cognos 8 planning : a practical guide to developing and deploying planning models for your enterprise

423 Pages·2009·9.578 MB·English

by  Ned Riaz, Jason Edwards, Rich Babaran

IBM Cognos 8 Planning
A practical guide to developing and deploying planning
models for your enterprise
Ned Riaz
Jason Edwards
Rich Babaran
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Anna Indahl on 12th August 2009
PSC 94 Box 361, , APO, , 09824
IBM Cognos 8 Planning
Copyright © 2009 Packt Publishing
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However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.
First published: July 2009
Production Reference: 1240709
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
32 Lincoln Road
Olton
Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK.
ISBN 978-1-847196-84-2
www.packtpub.com
Cover Image by Filippo Sarti ([email protected])
This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Anna Indahl on 12th August 2009
PSC 94 Box 361, , APO, , 09824
Credits
Authors Editorial Team Leader
Ned Riaz Akshara Aware
Jason Edwards
Rich Babaran Project Team Leader
Lata Basantani
Reviewers
Steve Ladd Project Coordinator
Joel Goveya
Sascha Mertens
Acquisition Editor Indexer
James Lumsden Monica Ajmera
Development Editor Proofreader
Siddharth Mangarole Dirk Manuel
Technical Editors Production Coordinator
Aanchal Kumar Adline Swetha Jesuthas
Akshara Aware
Cover Work
Bhupali Khule
Adline Swetha Jesuthas
This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Anna Indahl on 12th August 2009
PSC 94 Box 361, , APO, , 09824
About the Authors
Ned Riaz Ned Riaz is a Certified IBM Cognos Planning expert and principal
partner at Agile Strategic Business Consulting, a consulting company that
specializes in IBM Cognos Planning and Business Intelligence implementations.
Ned has obtained a B.S. degree in Accounting and Management Information
Systems, and he passed the CPA (Certified Public Accountant) exam after finishing
his degree. After finishing his education, Ned worked as an auditor, accountant,
and finance director in many industries, such as banks, software reselling, and
entertainment. He became involved in system development work in the late nineties,
and deployed various medium-sized accounting and general ledger systems.
Ned joined Adaytum Software, the original manufacturer of Planning products,
in late 1999 when Adaytum had less than 50 employees. He has been working with
Planning products since Contributor 1.1 and Analyst 2.2 were released in early 2000.
While working with Adaytum, Ned designed and built many Planning models for
a wide range of customers.
During his days in Adaytum and Cognos, Ned designed and deployed models
and systems for many large fortune 500 companies in various industries, such
as pharmaceutical, hospital, aircraft operations, and retailers.
As a partner/employee of Agile Strategic Business Consulting, Ned has been
involved in designing and deploying various models and systems at a large
information delivery corporation since 2006.
Ned and his wife live in Central Minnesota. He enjoys cycling, badminton,
and volunteering with rescued rabbits. He can be contacted at ned.riaz@
agilestrategic.com and on the Web at www.agilestrategic.com.
This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Anna Indahl on 12th August 2009
PSC 94 Box 361, , APO, , 09824
For their collaboration and insight, I would like to thank co-authors
Jason Edwards and Rich Babaran. Having open communication
between all co-authors greatly facilitated the writing of this book.
In addition, I would like to thank the staff at Packt for providing
the opportunity to write this book, as well as for their editors'
guidance in editing and streamlining core concepts.

I would also like to thank my wife for her support during the
writing of this book, and for helping me proof read and edit
the book's contents.
Jason Edwards is a Certified IBM Cognos Planning expert and founding partner
at Agile Strategic Business Consulting, a consulting company that specializes in IBM
Cognos Planning and Business Intelligence implementations.
Jason has ten years of experience in application design and development by using
corporate performance planning software in a broad range of industries, such as
telecommunications, retail, pharmaceutical, and entertainment. He specializes in
all phases of the development life cycle including requirements gathering, design,
development, and deployment. With efficiency and resourcefulness, Jason has
effectively led and managed highly successful IBM Cognos Planning implementations
for clients in Europe and the United States.
Jason holds a Bachelor's degree in accounting and finance from Kingston Business
School in the U.K. He started his career by modeling complex financial systems
in spreadsheets. It was while working as an International Business Analyst for a
global interactive games publisher a decade ago that he acquired his experience
of the dynamic and powerful corporate performance planning software Adaytum
(IBM Cognos Planning). From then on, Jason's passion for modeling sophisticated
forecasting systems led him into a career of consultancy devoted to helping clients
utilize the power of IBM Cognos Planning to achieve their organizational goals.
Jason believes that his dual expertise and experience in finance and information
technology and his ability in building strong client relationships has helped
him develop highly successful user accepted software solutions using IBM
Cognos Planning.
This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Anna Indahl on 12th August 2009
PSC 94 Box 361, , APO, , 09824
Jason lives with his wife and daughter in Philadelphia. He enjoys recreational
sports, such as cycling, soccer, and tennis and takes pleasure in exploring the
great restaurants and parks of Philadelphia with his family and friends.
Jason is continually looking for new opportunities and challenges and can
be contacted at [email protected] and on the Web at
www.agilestrategic.com.
I would like to thank my highly talented co-authors and extend my
sincere gratitude to the production team at Packt. I would especially
like to thank my wife, family, and friends for their patience and their
continued support and encouragement.

It was a pleasure to have co-authored this book with Ned Riaz
and Rich Babaran. I am certain that this book will be of great help
to anyone who is interested in understanding the techniques of
application development using IBM Cognos Planning.
Rich Babaran has over 20 years of experience in financial modeling and analysis,
corporate planning, performance measurement development, workflow modeling,
and process improvement. He has spent the last 9 years helping Fortune 500
companies improve their planning processes using IBM Cognos Planning. In
addition to architecting complete end-to-end planning solutions, Rich has helped
clients turnaround critical implementations by applying innovative techniques
learned from years of working in challenging environments. Rich has a degree in
Management Economics at the Ateneo de Manila University and an MBA at the
University of Illinois at Chicago. Rich can be contacted at [email protected].
My gratitude goes to Packt Publishing for giving us the opportunity
to write this book and to my co-authors from whom I have learned
a great deal. Also, I would like to thank the editors, reviewers, and
the rest of the Packt crew who made our work better than we could
have done alone. Most of all, I am grateful to my wife, who patiently
endured my absence as I poured my time into this book. Her
encouragements got me through the long hard days. If I stand tall,
it's only because of the rock that I stand on.
This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Anna Indahl on 12th August 2009
PSC 94 Box 361, , APO, , 09824
Acknowledgment
The authors would like to extend their thanks to Janosys Inc. for their gracious
support in the development of this book. Janosys Inc. is an authorized re-seller
and services provider of IBM (Cognos Software), and would like to thank IBM
for allowing us to use the product to build examples in this book. Amar Chabra
is the president of Janosys Inc.
During his 15+ years of tenure at Cognos (now owned by IBM) and as a founder
of Janosys, Inc. he has successfully deployed numerous Enterprise Planning (EP)
and Business Intelligence (BI) Solutions in various industries across the USA.
Amar can be reached at [email protected] or at the web site www.janosys.com
This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Anna Indahl on 12th August 2009
PSC 94 Box 361, , APO, , 09824
About the Reviewers
Steve Ladd is a Certified Cognos Planning Solution Designer, and a Senior
Consultant with a performance management consulting firm. He has 10 years
of technology experience, with a focus on performance management systems.
Steve is a seasoned (PMP certified) project manager who has led the development of
a diverse set of software solutions including financial planning, financial reporting,
and business intelligence systems. His experience includes working with accounting,
finance, operations, and IT in multiple industries, including retail, insurance, and
healthcare. His technical proficiencies include web development, ETL design, and
OLAP data modeling.
Steve lives in Austin, Texas with his wife Marisa and son Tyson. He is available
for consulting work and may be contacted at [email protected].
Sascha Mertens graduated from German University for Applied Sciences
(HS Niederrhein) in 2001 as an engineer of Economics. Focusing on the business
part of his degree, he began to work with Corporate Performance Management
(CPM) topics in his thesis on 'Redesign of a controlling system by means of a
Management Information System (MIS).'
When he started working at Deloitte in 2001, he was trained and certified in Analyst
and Contributor by Adaytum—the original software producer—before they were
acquired by Cognos and subsequently by IBM. With his gained knowledge, Sascha
started working for the first German planning project with Volkswagen Financial
Services AG, which was brought up to a status that is still live today. While this
project was realized on a nearly full Analyst model with several thousand Analyst
objects storing actual and plan data, he proceeded to grow himself with Cognos
Planning and its development in the direction of web technology.
This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Anna Indahl on 12th August 2009
PSC 94 Box 361, , APO, , 09824
Once Sascha encountered the magic and the fun of translating the business
requirements of CFOs and CIOs into powerful, full-blown, and integrated
information systems, he continued to contribute his knowledge to many different
projects. Through the modeling of system designs and architectural concepts, as well
as their implementations into CPM systems, Sascha developed all kinds of planning
models, such as sales planning, cost planning, personnel planning, and so on, up to
the resulting financial plans.
Working closely with Cognos, Sascha became a beta tester for several upcoming
Planning releases, and a community leader in one of the leading Cognos Planning
forums on the Internet. With a deep knowledge of the system internals, he developed
his own documentation tool for Cognos Planning systems which connects an
interactive online documentation of an IBM Cognos Analyst to IBM Cognos
Connection, and this is now used by a wide variety of his clients. With a strong
focus on the conceptual and business side, he conducted a study for the 'State of
planning within German companies' (Standortbestimmung zur Planung in deutschen
Unternehmen) and offered various public webcasts, such as 'planning scenarios and
simulations on board level', 'business planning for health insurance companies',
'decentralized sales planning within the franchise industry', and 'driver-based
planning within a fleet management company'.
During his time with Deloitte, Sascha progressed his way to a senior managing
level and designed and implemented Cognos Planning on a full-time basis in over
15 Cognos Planning and BI projects nationally, in Europe, and overseas, in the last
six years. These covered nearly all kinds of industries with a concentration in the
financial, biotech, and manufacturing industry and the public sector, spanning IT
systems from a single server environment to huge service infrastructures holding
more than 30 Planning servers that deliver services to more than 100 financial
institutes. In 2006 and 2007, he designed and modeled Cognos Planning for the
Austrian ministry of finance and implemented a planning system that was capable
of planning the national budget of the whole country.
Since 2008, Sascha has worked for Conunit, a consulting firm specializing in CPM
and BI solutions and the 'Cognos Partner of the year 2008 for Germany and Europe'.
Within Conunit, Sascha and his team continue the Cognos Planning story with
an offering of all kind of services around the IBM Cognos CPM and BI products,
including full-scope projects (concept, design and implementation), version
upgrades and their migrations, as well as performance enhancements and system
improvement checks.
This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Anna Indahl on 12th August 2009
PSC 94 Box 361, , APO, , 09824
It was a great pleasure reviewing this book. I am sure that it will
essentially help you to set up a planning system in your company.

I would also like to thank some great people from Deloitte
and Cognos whom I worked with in collaborative projects, and
who helped me gain experience with the product and all of the
topics around CPM.
This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by Anna Indahl on 12th August 2009
PSC 94 Box 361, , APO, , 09824