Bilflo vs. IBM Cognos Analytics

It aided the smooth operation of our recruitment process. Anyone who is interested in working with the company can gain access. Assume I'm a salesperson looking to expand my team. In that situation, I have the ability to approve or reject candidates, as well as add follow-ups to the dashboard. This is where I explain why I'm rejecting an applicant or why the interview has been rescheduled.

Incentivized

Working in a financial consulting industry where different clients with many data challenges such as length, structure, validity, cleanliness, and time arise, IBM Cognos have allowed the company to integrate, extract and use data with minimum effort resulting in potent reports and clear dashboards. That is a great advantage to other solutions in the market

Incentivized

• Bilflo gives me access to achieving my goals. It is very user-friendly system.
• The GP calculator is very helpful.
• This system allows for many different time-keeping and pay-structure.

Incentivized

• Pixel perfect reports. If a client can provide a pixel-perfect mockup, I can make the report indistinguishable from the mockup.
• Data security. It doesn't matter who the user is; when they log in and run a report, they will only see the data they are permitted to see.
• Performant reports on large data. Many tools have issues running on tables containing only a few million rows. Cognos can consistently run reports on multi-billion row tables without issue.
• Embedding reports in third-party tools. With Cognos Mashup Services, it is possible to build a report in IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson and call it programmatically. Need straight HTML? No problem. JSON? Atom? All good.

Incentivized

• Releases are irregular and often contain bugs.
• It takes time to integrate for the first time.

Incentivized

• OLAP-cubes MUST IMMEDIATELY be upgraded to 64-bit-technology (if not, we are lost as Cognos/IBM-customer).
• Easier integration of complex authorisation systems (concepts) into cubes (vertical as well as horizontal authorisation).
• Much more statistics-functionality in cubes! (IBM bought SPSS 10 years ago!! where is the benefit of Cognos-users!!)!!!

Incentivized

For an existing solution, renewing licenses does provide a good return on investment. Additionally, while rolling out scorecards and dashboards with little adhoc capabilities, to end users, cognos is very easily scalable. It also allows to create a solution that has a mix of OLAP and relational data-sources, which is a limitation with other tools. Synchronizing with existing security setup is easy too.

We have a strong user base (3500 users) that are highly utilizing this tool. Basic users are able to consume content within the applied security model. We have a set of advanced users that really push the limits of Cognos with Report and Query Studio. These users have created a lot of personal content and stored it in 'My Reports'. Users enjoy this flexibility.

Reports can typically be viewed through any browser that can access the server, so the availability is ultimately up to what the company utilizing it is comfortable with allowing, though report development tends to be more picky about browsers and settings as mentioned above. It also has an optional iPad app and general mobile browsing support, but dashboards lack the mobile compatibility. What keeps it from getting a higher score is the desktop tools that are vital to the development process. The compatibility with only Windows when the server has a wide range of compatibility can be a real sore point for a company that outfits its employees exclusively with Mac or Linux machines. Of course, if they are planning on outsourcing the development anyways, it's a rather moot point

Overall no major complaints but it doesn't handle DMR (Dimensionally Modeled for Relational) very well. DMR modelling is a capability that IBM Cognos Framework Manager provides allowing you to specify dimensional information for relational metadata and allows for OLAP-style queries. However, the capability is not very efficient and, for example, if I'm using only 2 columns on a 20-column model, the software is not smart enough to exclude 18 columns and the query side gets progressively larger and larger until it's effectively unusable.

The support team cares for the success of the party. They even provided full scale help in the implementation process.

Incentivized

Why is their web application not working as fast as you think it should? They never know, and it is always a a bunch of shots in the dark to find out. Trying to download software from them is like trying to find a book at the library before computers were invented.

Incentivized

Onsite training provided by IBM Cognos was effective and as expected. They did not perform training with our data which was a bit difficult for our end-users.

The online courses they offer are thorough and presented in such a way that someone who isn't already familiar with the general design methodologies used in this field will be capable of making a good design. The training environments are provided as a fully self contained virtual machine with everything needed already to create the environments. We've had some persisting issues with the environments becoming unavailable, but support has been responsive when these issues arise and straightening them out for us

Make sure that any custom tables that you have, are built into your metadata packages. You can still access them via SQL queries in Cognos, but it is much easier to have them as a part of the available metadata packages.

The AI and the automation in IBM Cognos Analytics are pretty simple to use and almost provide accurate data. The report part compared to the Medidata Rave is always efficient and error-proof I got the reports nearly 90 percent. The analysis is pretty good I actually got the outcome that I wanted to produce.

Incentivized

The Cognos architecture is well suited for scalability. However, the architecture must be designed with scalability in mind from day one of the implementation. We recently upgraded from 10.1 to 10.2.1 and took the opportunity to revamp our architecture. It is now poised for future growth and scalability.

• It definitely made an positive impact overall.
• The features are amazing and useful.

Incentivized

• The team that implemented this software tells me that the ROI is not obtained instantly; it must go through long months before obtaining good results.
• There are functions that are not easy for all users; this makes it difficult to obtain positive results in the first months.
• A year has to pass before noticing that after its configuration, we can work without delays.

Incentivized