Before introducing various IBM Cognos tools, let's sketch out a scenario to explain how IBM Cognos is used in corporate planning processes.
Panda Garden Inc., a regional restaurant chain, is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Panda Garden has 20 restaurants throughout the metropolitan St. Paul/Minneapolis area. Each restaurant offers the same menu and operates under strict corporate guidelines.
As the Corporate Planning Manager, you are responsible for planning, analyzing, and reporting for each restaurant's financial activities, as well as consolidating the results of financial operations.
To fulfill your job responsibilities, you would like to do the following tasks:
Send out a standard template, as illustrated in the following screenshot, to all of the twenty restaurants, to collect planning data
Consolidate the collected information and then analyze the details to understand the profitability of each of the stores
Inform senior management of how are we doing via metrics and...
