IBM Cognos is a full-featured business intelligence suite by IBM, designed for larger deployments. It comprises Query Studio, Reporting Studio, Analysis Studio and Event Studio, and Cognos Administration along with tools for Microsoft Office integration, full-text search, and dashboards.
$10
per month per user
Workday Adaptive Planning
Score 7.8 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Workday Adaptive Planning(formerly Adaptive Insights) is a financial planning and reporting tool. It includes automated budgeting and forecasting, financial reporting, and other active planning capabilities, including integrations with third-party products like Salesforce.
Our previous platform was patchwork tools and unintegrated. We were clunky and poorly organized. The system was slow and
difficult to use, and it was either overhaul it or start over. We evaluated our
options holistically and went with Workday. It works better and faster, and …
Adaptive is much more flexible and powerful for our needs. It provides a wealth of reporting tools and capabilities that Cognos simply didn't or couldn't provide. The ability to have a team of one completely implement and manage the solution for a company is not unreasonable …
Adaptive Insights is well-positioned against the new tier of SaaS players as well as the larger, legacy, on-premise financial planning solutions such as Hyperion and IBM Cognos TM1. Its got an approachable user interface and relatively easy to use models and forecast …
In our evaluation process we looked at Hyperion and Cognos TM-1. The level of customization and professional services required to implement were significantly higher with these other 2 solutions. Adaptive is much easier to learn and doesn't require long term consultant …
Adaptive's cloud-based solution suited our business model better. Its simplicity of use and ease of implementation whilst providing a robust platform made it the best choice.
I have used TM1 and Hyperion in the past and I find Adaptive to be cleaner, more flexible, quicker, and more powerful. It is extremely user friendly and intuitive which means the ramp time for a new employee to feel comfortable and competent with the tool is comparably short. …
I used IBM's Cognos TM1 with a previous employer, and although TM1 is powerful, it also requires a lot of IT work. Adaptive can be completely supported and maintained by the finance users who use and implement it. It does not require any IT support or maintenance. The …
Large Stack Vendors Compared with financial planning and reporting offerings from IBM Cognos TM1, SAP BPM and Oracle BPM Suite / Hyperion, the Adaptive Suite offers most of the capability but deploys in around 10-30% of the time and provides total cost of ownership savings of …
Verified User
Manager
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
Cognos - capabilities are very similar. Cognos does allow a "push-down" (e.g. current rollup of Outside Services is $600k, enter $1mm at the highest level and the additional $400k is spread to the lowest level based on the existing spread).
We also looked at A3 Solutions, Budget …
Verified User
Manager
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
I've implemented Host Analytics at a previous company. We performed an extensive vendor selection process and Adaptive Insights came out on top. Adaptive Insights allowing us to use a demo helped prove the functionality of the software. Since we've started implementation there …
We selected Adaptive Insights for two reasons: 1. They are cloud based. With the software being managed on the cloud, we do not need to worry about managing servers, broken data tables, or other back-end concerns. We also don't have to wait for our (already taxed) IT department …
Features
IBM Cognos Analytics
Workday Adaptive Planning
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cognos Analytics
7.5
111 Ratings
9% below category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
9.3
1 Ratings
21% above category average
Pixel Perfect reports
7.5101 Ratings
9.01 Ratings
Customizable dashboards
7.8109 Ratings
10.01 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates
7.2105 Ratings
9.01 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cognos Analytics
7.6
113 Ratings
5% below category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
8.0
1 Ratings
0% above category average
Drill-down analysis
7.5110 Ratings
9.01 Ratings
Formatting capabilities
7.5112 Ratings
7.01 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages
7.679 Ratings
8.01 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration
7.9108 Ratings
8.01 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
IBM Cognos Analytics
8.0
112 Ratings
3% below category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
8.0
1 Ratings
1% below category average
Publish to Web
8.327 Ratings
00 Ratings
Publish to PDF
7.6106 Ratings
8.01 Ratings
Report Versioning
8.626 Ratings
8.01 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling
7.6109 Ratings
8.01 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers
8.112 Ratings
00 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
I use predictive analytics techniques, which can help me predict my future sales based on collected data, giving me insight into my market's trends.This market data can be analyzed, giving me the opportunity to gain in-depth insight into my market's competition and positioning it competitively, aided by developing strategies to improve my marketing approach.
In a previous company, I was hired based on my experience with Workday Adaptive Planning. After being hired and reviewing the company, I quickly determined they were not large of enough of a company to need the program. Instead, we made better Excel budget templates, utilized OneDrive and created a better experience without the cost. Left the job after 9 months because I worked my way out of the position. My next role I looked for bigger companies and had better success with implementation.
It helps create dynamic plans for finances, operations and various functional units in an organization all under one platform
It helps in scenario modeling to help analyze various business events and report by any number of business dimensions including channel, customer or product
It can be integrated with any system including ERP, BI or CRM
Web reports and sheets are not great for in-depth reporting, and require the use of the OfficeConnect for Excel plugin and, therefore, the use of Excel for extensive reporting capabilities.
It has limited formula functionality in some instances, requiring again the use of OfficeConnect for Excel for extensive calculations.
I would like to see new planning sheet types or upgrades to existing sheet types; functionality has been the same for over 10 years.
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.
For one we're in way too deep to not move forward with Adaptive. We're integrated with Workday, we do a ton of reporting with Adaptive, and it's working very well for planning and forecasting. No reason to look back or change course.
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.
Workday Adaptive Planning has detailed online help with both articles and videos that are comprehensive. It has a lot of similarities to Excel, which most finance people are already familiar with, plus the user interface is intuitive and easy to pick up. The online support team is quick to respond and very knowledgeable.
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
There haven't been any lately. The only one issue I can think of is when there was an update in Adaptive that altered our reports. Before I realized there was an issue, Adaptive reached out to let me know, so that it could be fixed.
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.
All aspects of Adaptive Insights perform well. One area that I wish was quicker was integration. When importing data from Intacct our accounting ERP platform, it can sometimes take 4 hours for the import to process. The earlier imports are done, the quicker they complete. My estimate for a quick upload is about two hours.
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.
Whenever we have had any questions, issues, or concerns, the support has been quick and thorough. [This] allow[s] us to be able to fully resolve any issues, or be connected with the right group quickly to attain the result we were after; be it from simple formatting to adding new detailed reporting.
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.
This was extremely helpful so that they could walk you through the model and teach you more about the complexity of various areas. It is most helpful when it is specific to your organization's model. The larger in-person trainings were helpful but they tended to be more generic and entry level. The trainings that are more tailored to your specific needs are the most helpful.
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
They often times tended to be way too generic or entry level. They would also become sales pitches to upgrade or get new Adaptive Planning products. The questions in the training would be very niche and specific to other organizations. They were rarely helpful to the group at large.
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.
Trust the expertise of very strong 3rd party implementers. Having deployed Adaptive at a separate company before, I thought I knew it all (hubris, I know). Fortunately, I began to (very quickly) trust the judgment of our Carlson implementation team, and they provided invaluable insights and best-in-class processes that have benefitted me and my team greatly.
My company selected IBM Congos Analytics because of its advanced features and data representation for data analysis. Its row and column features are very effective for creating dashboards and reports to visualize data. It's chart representation and view format are very attractive and useful for representation.
Workday became our choice because it is fully web-based and easily integrates with other systems. The learning curve for Workday was shorter than that of Dynamics. The reporting tools in Workday are more user-friendly than that of Dynamics. However Workday did not have Check Printing tools which are available in Dynamics. The organization started a project to digitize all financial transactions so it was not a priority feature. When it comes to scaling up the functionalities of Workday it was much easier than Dynamics.
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.
We went from 2 users to 70+ users over a 2 year period of time. The application scaled wonderfully. 65 of those users were non-finance users so they were able to quickly learn the software and prepare budgets quickly and efficiently. That is the power of Adaptive and its ability to scale
Positive: It provides collaboration and sharing of knowledge with other users which provides centralized access to data and reports.
Positive: It helps organization to save time and be efficient as it provides self service analytics and automated workflows.
Positive: With its powerful analytics and reporting capabilities it enables user to explore and analyze their data, identify the trends and make decisions based on those insights.
Negative: Implementing Cognos Analytics will take investments on licensing cost, training and infrastructure.
Negative: As it provides many features and capabilities, it is an issue with organization having limited IT support configure and maintain the platform.
It's facilitated a better financial literacy and management by the non-financial managers in the company, giving them a much better ability to see what they're spending, control it, and plan better in the future.
It's hard to quantify the ease of model and version management, but we could never do what we're doing now with our current staff. It would take a small army to replicate anything close to what Adaptive pulls off using Excel, if it's even possible.
