IBM Cognos Event Studio is often an underutilized Studio but has its place. I think it would be better to explain how you can use this Studio in your everyday duties instead of the traditional white paper approach.  I will use a couple of examples that I think highlight how a business group (departments) can use Event Studio and how a database modeler can use Event Studio.

Scenario A – Process Support

• Sales Order Table holds sales order detail and is important to the production management process. When a sales order is created, a sales order number is automatically created but an order category must be manually entered. The order category is needed by production to prioritize inbound orders. The company cannot change their ERP because of cost and time, so customer service is responsible to enter the category.

The production department expects a report with all orders categorized.  If the orders are not categorized, they might get missed. Clearly we don’t want to risk missing an order, so how do we ensure all orders are categorized?

We create an event that looks at all open orders and find any which do not have a category. When we find one, we send an email to customer service with the order number so they can correct the order. We can schedule the event to run every five minutes or as often as required to make sure the production report is correct and no order is missed.

Scenario B – Data Warehouse

• You have a data warehouse which you use for reporting. Before your data is brought into the warehouse, it is staged for cleaning (transformation). Data that doesn’t pass certain business rules and will require human review are placed in a quarantined area within staging. The clean data is then loaded into the warehouse.  This means there will be a difference between the warehouse and the data source.

To settle the discrepancy, we can create an event that monitors the quarantined area to send an email with an attached report.  This report shows all of the records which did not make it into the warehouse along with the reason why.

This will allow the business to review and correct the data without having to ask IT why it data did not make it into the warehouse.

Cognos Event Studio can help you maintain clean data. Give it a try it might be just what your company needs! Feel free to contact us at Sales@LodestarSolutions.com for more information.