Cognos Podcasts

Leveraging your ERP Data Series:
SAP and Cognos, an IBM company

Scott Lawerence of Cognos explains the value for SAP customers to pair up their SAP solutions with Cognos

Duration: 10 min 7 sec

This the fourth episode in the five part "Leveraging Your Data" podcast series from Cognos, an IBM company.

Summary
Join James MacCuaig and Scott Lawrence for 10 minutes on how customers benefit by combining Cognos & SAP. Learn to leverage your SAP investment, why Powered by SAP NetWeaver status matters, and how to help users get more from your SAP system faster.

Description

Learn how you can benefit from the Cognos SAP relationship to leverage your existing SAP investment, access multiple heterogeneous data sources, and reduce the time it takes users to get results.

Host James MacCuaig interviews Scott Lawrence, Director of SAP Product Marketing at Cognos, and covers a variety of important topics for SAP users. You will learn how Cognos was the first business intelligence vendor to receive the Powered by SAP NetWeaver certification which represents the highest possible level of product integration. According to Lawrence, SAP even uses Cognos as an example of how closely SAP can be integrated with other applications. Cognos actually provides bundled product offerings with SAP and business intelligence products shipping in the same package.

Lawrence discusses how Cognos business intelligence can simultaneously provide insights into, and reports on, SAP BW data, SAP R/3 data, and other data sources to provide a single source of information for business decisions. He goes on to point out that business users can rely on these abilities without IT support to drive business decisions at their own pace. From reporting to analysis, from event management to dashboards and scorecards, all the business intelligence options for looking into your data are available.

The depth of integration between Cognos and SAP extends beyond technology to business rules so that users can take advantage of options like single secure sign on across SAP BW and SAP Portal, aggregations, hierarchies, and multiple variables.

MacCuaig learns that regardless of source, Cognos allows customers to combine their historical and transaction data into a single view of the truth. This scope includes over 60 prebuilt reports for FICO that can sit directly on top of R/3 data for financials.

The interview closes with a look at the details of the recent enterprise search announcement from Cognos which enables a web based, common language search capability across SAP and non SAP data. These search results can then be exposed through a portal such as the SAP enterprise portal.

Finally, Lawrence addresses some of the industry verticals in which Cogns and SAP work together such as manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and financial services. He points to several real world examples including Eastman Chemicals which uses Cognos business intelligence to bridge the gap between its 10 year old legacy data warehouse and a modern SAP BW system.