The Cognos Sales and Operations planning and trade planning blueprints are designed to help manufacturing firms to better coordinate and monitor sales and demand forecasts with supply plans and evaluate multiple brands and promotions scenarios respectively.
Cognos said it is planning to release more manufacturing-specific blueprints later this year.
The industry-specific blueprints are the latest in a succession that Cognos’ Innovation Center for Performance Management has been churning out over the past year.
Ottawa-based Cognos introduced the notion of performance blueprints a couple of years ago, as a way to infuse best practices into its corporate performance management (CPM) system. The idea is to help companies jump-start their corporate planning initiatives by offering best practice application templates.
All the blueprint applications run on the Cognos 8 BI platform foundation.
The race to provide vertical BI solutions is certainly on. Earlier this year Cognos rolled out a slew of performance blueprints for retail, banking and pharmaceuticals.
Archrival Business Objects SA also recently unleashed a cadre of partner-developed analytic applications aimed at the communications industry as part of a strategy to verticalize its BI software technologies. It has also released a vertical BI offering targeted at the healthcare and life sciences sectors that was developed in conjunction with IBM Corp.
