One solution for how, why, and "what if?"

Paul Hoy, manufacturing industry director at Cognos, recently displayed an effusive mood.

"From a product perspective, it's been a monumental year," he enthuses. Pressed for a particular highlight, he settles on the launch of the Cognos 8 Business Intelligence application as the most significant development of the last year, but freely concedes it's a tough choice.

"With a zero footprint, and service-oriented architecture-compliant, it meets the needs of a whole range of users, from the casual to the high-end user needing pixel-perfect reports—including those wanting dashboards and scorecards so that there's a single place to view all metrics across the entire manufacturing operation," he says. "The scorecards and dashboards tell them how they are doing, with linked analytics to highlight exactly why they are performing like that."

Even better, Hoy continues, is collaborative planning functionality acquired through the 2003 purchase of Adaytum, which allows modeling the impact of any changes so as to determine how best to bring performance back to its target. Taken together, he says, it all represents a "one-stop shop" for how, why, and "what if?"

Hoy believes the timing is propitious. "In the marketplace, there's a definite move among users to want to standardize on a single vendor for these three things," he says. "But they don't want to have to implement all three at once—and of course, they don't have to."

Users have been just as vocal at expressing a preference for exactly what they want to buy, adds Hoy.

"We've always been known for tools, but now, companies want solutions configured around specific needs. Consequently, we're introducing what we call blueprints targeted on specific tasks such as capital planning, or workforce analytics. It's the same three questions—how, why, what if?—but built around a specific business scenario."