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Cognos, and IBM Company
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Acorn and Cognos, an IBM Company
Cognos customers like you have confidently selected and successfully implemented Acorn as their trusted partner for profit improvement solutions.
"The objective, simply stated, was to create an activity-based view of client profitability. We have a complicated product array with unique servicing variations that require detailed costing of resources being assigned to the clients. Early indications are positive that we will be able to give our relationship managers and brokers useful and actionable insights into the profitability of their individual client relationships."
Craig Coit, CFO, Aon Risk Services
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If you are a Cognos customer, you too can enjoy the best of both worlds: strong data warehouse, business intelligence, and performance management applications from IBM Cognos, and the world’s leading performance measurement solutions from Acorn – integrated, automated, and proven. Yes, it’s possible to have your cake and eat it too. Acorn is a Cognos Gold Technology Partner and a Powered by IBM Cognos Software Partner. Acorn leverages Cognos BI and performance management solutions (budgeting, planning and forecasting) to deliver our best-of-breed solution to you. A partial list of marquee Cognos customers who chose Acorn for their profit improvement includes: Aon Risk Services, Janssen Pharmaceutica, and Maines Paper and Food.
How does Acorn's solution fit into your Cognos environment?
How do we make it easy and cost effective to leverage your investment in Cognos?
Why is Acorn's solution complementary, and not in competition to, your Cognos offerings?
Why is Acorn's solution superior to the simplistic cost and profit capabilities available via Cognos?
How does Acorn’s solution fit into your Cognos environment?
Like most Cognos customers, you have a variety of core systems from Cognos including:
• Cognos 8 BI including reporting, analysis, scorecarding and dashboards
• Performance management applications including Cognos 8 Planning and/or Cognos TM1 (Applix)
• A variety of other vendors' platforms which together comprise your global ERP, financials, core and departmental applications, and data/IT infrastructure
You are not alone. Acorn’s solution works with, and is agnostic to, the variety of source data systems, applications (ERP, financials, CRM, SCM, etc.), data warehouses/databases, and business intelligence platforms you have.
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How do we make it easy and cost effective to leverage your investment in Cognos?
1. Data in: We leverage critical data from your core applications and/or Cognos data warehouse into Acorn via automated extraction, transformation and load routines that “feed” Acorn. To make it simple to install and automated, we provide a packaged utility called the Acorn Universal Connector that makes it easy to get data into Acorn for cost and profit calculations. This utility is packaged with our core platform applications.
2. Acorn’s solution creates new insight into the revenue, cost, net profit and resource capacity utilization of any dimension of your business in a unified model.
3. Insight/data out: After Acorn calculates your new performance management insight, you can leverage your existing Cognos data warehouse and BI platforms of choice – preserving your investment, training and adoption of these offerings. Think about it this way. New insight from Acorn enhances and “feeds” the data already contained in your data warehouse. Or, you can leverage your rich Acorn insight with Cognos’ BI solutions including Cognos 8. We make it easy and automated to use your Cognos BI offering for advanced analytics, with our packaged solution: Acorn’s Advanced Analytics and Advanced Analytics Connector for Cognos 8 BI.
4. Do you want a “closed loop” solution? You can run your budgets, plans, and forecasts through your Acorn model to determine the cost, profitability, and resource capacity necessary for your plans. Leverage the rich driver information created by Acorn with your Cognos performance management solutions, including budgeting, planning and forecasting. That’s the power of the integration between Acorn and your Cognos performance management solutions. To learn more on this topic, click here to visit Cognos’ innovation center, where several joint Acorn and Cognos blueprints are featured.
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Why is Acorn’s solution complementary, and not in competition to, your Cognos offerings?
Cognos does not offer an enterprise-wide cost and profitability management solution; Acorn does. Sure, simplistic driver-models can be built using one of the Cognos planning applications, but when it comes to enterprise-scale, multi-dimensional, and accurate costing and profitability analysis, that’s where Acorn comes in.
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Why is Acorn’s solution superior to the simplistic cost and profit capabilities available via Cognos?
1. Cognos does not perform "bottoms-up" or transaction level costing and profitability analysis. They perform a simplistic "tops-down" approach for high level costing and profitability. Nor does Cognos’ solution truly scale to your enterprise at a granular level of analysis. If you want transaction, order, account, customer, or product level analysis, Cognos’ solution can’t help – Acorn’s can.
2. Cognos’ planning applications do not provide an unlimited number of dimensions for costing and profitability analysis in a single unified model – such as account, customer, customer segment, channel, org, etc. You are limited – and that’s limiting your ability to drive profit improvement via root cause analysis and insight.
3. Cognos’ offerings were not architected to deliver the time-driven ABC (TDABC) methodology. Acorn’s solution was architected to accommodate a wide variety of methodologies including TDABC, a methodology we invented and wrote the book on.
4. Cognos does not have the depth/breath of world-class experts in costing and profitability that Acorn does. In fact, no company does. Success for you is as much about your partners’ expertise, proven methodologies, and best practices as it is the technology. Talk to the Acorn profit experts to experience the difference.
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