IBM Cognos 8 on SAP Overview for Report Consumers, Part 1 Portlets Screen 2:

Hello everyone, This is the first in a 2 part demo series that provides a very high level overview of Cognos 8 on SAP. In this demo we will walk through various portlets that are available. Screen 3:

Lets switch to a browser with a Cognos connection open. We see different types of information displayed that allow us to browse, search and view interact. Scroll down: Lets look at the sales activity dashboard. Sales activity dashboard can be run as often as needed to update information in the portlet. We can see the information by products, by quarter, by return quantity, etc. It is an interactive dashboard, we can hover over the slices in the pie chart or bars in the graph to give us more details. Scroll up: Lets go to the metrics portlet. Another way to view data is with metrics. Organizations have many key performance indicators. We can see how they are doing instantly with yellow, red, and green indicators. We can see the actual numbers, the target numbers and the variations between the two. Lets go to he news portlet, at the upper right corner of the browser. We can see some alerts have been generated. Lets click the Pipeline shortfall for Netherlands link, to see further details. Lets click read and see why this report was generated and show us more details. Screen 4: Lets return to start my day by clicking on the Start my day button at the top of the browser.

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Here we can see the navigation and search portlets. In the navigation portlet, the new sales activity is the default dashboard. We can see to other dashboards available under it. The search portlet allows us to find reports with particular keywords in the name or description. Go to the search portlet and type product, scroll up and click on Guest Spending Dashboard. Screen 6:

In Cognos it tool only 20 minutes to create this complex highly formatted report. Scroll down, scroll up and view the reports Click on the Interactive Dashboard button at the top of the screen. Screen 7:

An interactive dashboard asks questions and interacts live.

Scroll down, In the quantity sold by region chart, lets hover over the tall green bar for the United states to show the quantity. We can select a different product line and select the rerun button. For instance, if consumer electronics is selected as in this example, United States quantity is also updated. Hover over the green bar again and you can see that the quantity has changed. Scroll up and select the BW and Non BW Reporting link at the top of the browser. Screen 8:

Scroll down, Top left query is planned revenue data pulled from a relational source. Actual revenue showed in top right query is stored in SAP Business whare house. I the bottom query data is combined and an actual revenue can be compared. A calculation of variance is created between the two. No programming is required to make this happen on the back end, it is all in the report booting process used by Report Studio. Scroll up, Select the Operational Reporting link at the top right of the browser. Lets move on to operational reporting. Screen 9:

These reports can be run against data in R3 or ECC. This report is the AP Organization view, showing top 10 invoice summary by vendor. At the top of the report the filter information and when last executed are displayed. Cognos allows us to define the reporting preferences we want such as report format, with a run in html or pdf. We are bringing back transaction detail in a highly formatted transaction star report using the same front end used to deliver dashboards.

In conclusion: Cognos is a single front end regardless of data source, whether BI, ECC or non SAP data source. A single product with a single front end.