COGNOS POWERPLAY 6.0: Empowering Your Organization

cognos’

PowerPlay allows users to view data in multi-dimensional formats. Thus, it

gives decision-makers the power to explore various perspectives in the data,

often resulting in the exposure of hitherto-missed insights lying within the

data. It enables users to create applications that read source data and

manipulate it into a multi-dimensional presentation called a ‘cube’. Each

cube is in essence a datamart which provides the information that users need to

analyze their operations. By structuring source data to reflect the way an

organization operates and what its users need, an application can be created,

which provides timely and meaningful information.

Some possibilities with

PowerPlay are:

• Comparing
  
  first-quarter sales over the past five years across locations.

• Analyzing
  
  proportion of the total business by product over the years.

• Viewing
  
  seasonal trends in business revenues over the past years.

• Ranking
  
  products, customers, sales person’s performance over the past years and
  
  observing upward or downward movement of ranking.

• Analyzing
  
  planned and actual business performance, and observing the variance over the
  
  past years.

Every PowerPlay report consists

of a cube, in its native .MDC format. Various dimensions within the report are

presented in the dimension line. Each element in the dimension line is named a

‘dimension folder’. It is possible to explore each of the dimension folders

contained within reports.

With PowerPlay, it is possible to

quickly move from one level of detail to another, exploring various aspects and

perspectives of the data.<Data can be sliced and diced to

show revenue for each location over the past few months, or inventory levels for

each branch of the organization at the end of the quarter. It is also possible

to introduce data filters. For example, total revenue from all product lines may

be modified to reflect revenue only from the north region for all product lines.

Adding nested columns or rows is

yet another way to generate fresh insights from within the data. It is possible

to add nested dimensions easily by dragging a dimension folder to the row and

vice-versa.

With PowerPlay, the user may also

change the measure used in the report. For example, information can be examined

using, say, revenue measure and then, look at the same information using profit

margin as the measure. The process is completely intuitive, with the need to

remember complex formulae or even click through half a dozen icons, being

obviated.

A small, but fairly comprehensive

set of built-in graph formats complement drab-looking tables. All the popular

graph formats–from line diagram, vertical bar charts, histograms to pie

charts, are present.

PowerPlay should be a useful addition to the

business arsenal of multi-product, multi-location organizations seeking to hone

business strategies based on past trends. PowerPlay’s uniqueness lies in its

ability to do simple, pre-set operations with a minimum number of mouse clicks.

However, pre-set options also restrict the analyses and hence, insights

contained in the data could be lost too.

Surendran Nambiath