IBM Cognos Analytics with Watson vs Workday Adaptive Planning

IBM Cognos Analytics provides our organization with a workspace for data visualization and analysis, with a wide variety of customization options. It is well suited for exploring and discovering trends with the information provided in real time. It has the ability to create very attractive reports and dashboards. It offers robust controls for comprehensive data protection, generating reliability in the use of significant information

Compassion as a Non Profit provides funds to partners for Child Support. Workday Adaptive Planning can help the Partner to Provide the expense information monthly so their fund allocation can be approved for disbursement. This way the Field Officers do not have to collect the data in excel for review and approval before loading it into the current system before disbursement is done.

• 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.

• Version Management. Adaptive lets us manage many versions/scenarios all in one platform with the robust ability to compare them to each other.
• Processing Performance. With the Elastic Hypercube technology that was implemented a few years back, we can watch changes flow through a complex web of formulas and arrive at an answer within seconds.
• Audit Trail. Our administrators love the ability to see and report on who made what changes when, which leads to real accountability within the organization.

• 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!!)!!!

• It would be beneficial to me, as a user, if there was a library of documentation for every type of feature. This could be something regarding formula building, understanding how attributes work, with examples, or a location for basic and advance documentation on Sheet/Model/Cubes.
• I would like to have the ability to directly assign some dimensions to accounts easier. A drag and drop feature for that would be interesting. This has been a challenge for me when new dimensions are built and I am unable to assign them to new accounts.
• I would also like to see some more formulas or an easier way to do some basic tasks. For example a simple YTD function instead of running a simple, yet long string of texts for the formulas. Or the option for selecting YTD features, removing the need of the formula all together.

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.

Our 3rd party vendor walked us through the whole process and was available for questions after we started using the Adaptive Insights. I would suggest using the online training environment plus an individual walk through of your company's model to get more acquainted with the instance. There were also on-line tutorials to help us along the way.

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

The training program in Adaptive Insight has grown quite a bit, since I originally implemented in Adaptive Insights. I would now give it a 10 rating and suggest that anyone implementing for the first time work through the certification program. The certification program is a very detailed in depth primer to understanding how the system works.

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.

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.

After researching several CPM products, Adaptive and Prophix actually both met our needs quite well. The Adaptive Sales & Design Team went above and beyond in the early stages of exploring whether Adaptive could meet some of our very specific needs. Adaptive's customer service during the exploration phase was noticeably present. We chose Adaptive and a vendor in our local area to implement. Budget Maestro seemed to require more IT resources than what we desired to invest. Vena Solutions was a bit pricey from our perspective and Xlerant didn't quite have what we were looking for in a budgeting tool.

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

• 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.

• We are seeing more and more how Adaptive can go beyond financial metrics and cross into operational metrics. As we work with other departments in the business, we are working hard to make Adaptive the system of record when it comes to KPI reporting and measuring.