As a business analytics coach at Lodestar Solutions, it is our passion to talk about things that make your job easier. Today we are going to talk about Congos Command Center and how to automate Cognos Transformer Cubes. IBM purchased this nifty product earlier in 2015 and probably was one of the best purchases as far as performance management is concerned. So what does Cognos Command center (formally known as Star Analytics) do?  It helps automate & integrate reporting, planning, and analytics across the enterprise. This can be done for both on premise and cloud environments. The product removes the need for custom workflow processes and manual management of things like data loads, reconciliation, and notifications.

Cognos Command Center can connect to not only IBM Cognos products like TM1, but also to Oracle HFM, EPM, Essabse, Planning, and QlickTech Qlikview. You can potentially send and receive data to and from these products. This integration capability is huge because today, many large organizations have these products and the IT department struggles with integrating these systems. With Command Center, this data transfer can be made simple.

Upon logging into Cognos Command center, you get a very clean and informative dashboard which is called the Process Overview. Here, you get a snapshot of all the processes that ran with their status, start date and time, complete date and time, and user records. You can then drill into a very intuitive tree structure that provides info on different levels of administration. In addition, you can have an ecosystem for Corporate consolidations or Corporate Planning which are two separate functions within an organization but could rely on the same data. Within each ecosystem, you can have different environments that can be controlled separately. An example of an environment can be data loads, Financial report generation, or reconciliation processes.

Cognos Command Center for TM1

A TM1 process in Cognos Command Center can be structured in such a way that greatly improves on the current capabilities of TM1 like nightly refreshes and daily data reconciliation to the source system. As we know in order to create nightly processes, a lot of custom coding has to be done such as triggering the TM1 data load when the source system has the data available – Making sure that the data loads do not conflict with other activities on the system – Error handling – Sending email notifications. With Cognos Command Center, all these activities can be setup under one process by environment such as Production or QA.

Cognos Command Center for the Cloud

There is a great benefit for using Command Center with applications on the cloud. With TM1 on the cloud, you can create a task that combines TI processes that load data from a file. For example, you can create a task that automates a scheduled upload of a data file to the cloud by using FTPS and runs a TI process that loads the data into your TM1 on cloud. The task can then run a second TI process to export the results of the first TI process and download the results back to your local computer. You can use Cognos Command Center to bridge on premise and cloud activities. You can also manage cloud-to-cloud activities.

Cognos Command Center is a powerful and feature packed tool that complements the current suite of products under the IBM umbrella. It also helps bridge the gap between the cloud and other popular financial management applications.  Click HERE to view IBM's page on Congos Command Center or contact us at Sales@LodestarSolutions.com for more information on how to automate Cognos Transformer Cubes.