1. Introduction
Cognos is IBM's Business Intelligence (BI) and performance management software suite. The software is designed to enable business users without any technical knowledge, to extract corporate data, analyze it and assemble reports.
While Cognos provide a whole suite of business intelligence reporting software and tools, their name has become synonymous with OLAP (Online Analytical Processing).
Cognos BI can be used in the organizations for various tasks:
- Verifying importance of parameters
- Segmenting and profiling of customers
- Monitoring customers' loyalty and withdrawals
- Checking customers' maintenance
- Finding similarities
- Studying frauds
- Studying marketing campaigns
- and carrying out cross sales
Cognos BI can be categorized into two parts
- User Products.
- Developer Products.
2. Client
Zinio is a publishing technology and services company, which provides sales and distribution of printed material in digital format including magazines, books, catalogs, newsletters and research. In this capacity, Zinio is the world's largest newsstand and bookstore.
Zinio's website allows various books to be read either online or downloaded to be read offline on both computers (Windows, Mac OS X and Linux-based computers) and portable devices such as the iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android.
Zinio is more than a mobile reading application. Zinio, for more than a decade, has been creating digital editions of magazines, delivering the exact material one gets in print‚ plus exclusive features like video, audio and live links, on iPad, iPhone, desktop and laptop.
3. Requirement
Zinio is a digital newsstand publisher of magazines, books, catalogs and newsletters in digital format for users across the globe. Customers can access Zinio products from portable devices like iPad, iPhone, Android, desktop and laptop.
Zinio maintains the data, based on the customers, products, countries, orders, issues, sales, and revenues. Zinio uses SQL Server database to store huge data and uses IBM Cognos as a reporting tool.
4. Solution
Using Cognos, reports were designed and developed to suit business needs. Following are few sample reports:
PUB01 Delivery Report
This report provides information about total no. of issues processed and in that, how many got delivered and how many were undelivered, based on publication and type of publication for each selected publisher.
Pub 03 Undelivered Labels Report
This report provides information about undelivered labels of a publication. It contains the total number of undelivered labels based on the number of inactive users, duplicate labels, duplicate emails, inactive emails, invalid issue, opt out emails and others.
Pub 02 Remit Rate for Partners
This report contains information about the Remit rate of partners of Zinio. The report will give information about sales quantity, return quantity, sales amount, return amount and remit rates of the publisher and resellers based on application for each selected publication.
AT01 Zinio Orders and Cancels
This report provides information about the number of orders executed and number cancelled for selected franchisees and publishers. The report has separate lists for both orders and cancellations along with user and order information like user name, mail address, country, order creation date, no. of issues, net sales amount etc.
Z02 Daily Revenue Report
This report provides information about daily sales and revenues by franchisees. Every day, it gives hourly information based on the Newsstand, Reader platform, Publisher, Publication and User Count.
Hourly Orders
This report provides information about the number of orders. Order count will be displayed after every one hour in a day. The data will be represented graphically using line chart.
Daily Executive Dashboard
This is a dashboard report. It contains bar charts, line charts and report lists. This dashboard report provides information on retail revenues, orders, purchases, visitors and registered users. The user has the option to run the report for 'month to date, week to date, year to date and today'.
