Cognos Planning - Business Requirements\Planning Requirements

[isap]

Hi all,
I am absolutely new to Cognos Planning (currently- working on 8.4). I have followed the tutorial to create the sample D-lists and P&L cube provided on the IBM website. But I am very curious to know wat the requirements look like? Are they word documented or spreadsheet formatted? Any screenshots or samples will be really helpful. Also, if someone could guide me on my next approach towards Contributor (from Analyst model) - do I publish the model before working with the contributor? Any quick replies will be highly appreciated. Thanks a lot in advance!

P.S. Trying to save my job by acquiring the cognos planning skills.

[ericlfg]

Hey Isap,

I'm not sure I understand your questions regarding what the requirements look like? 

Just as a heads up, Planning comes bundled with a number of fully functional samples that you can use in analyst and contributor.

As for the contributor side of things you will need to:
- make sure you have a datastore and a job server cluster configured in the CAC (contributor admin console) and ensure that you add the planning store resource to the cluster.
- right click on Application beneath your datastore and select 'create new application'
- go through the application creation wizard steps
- once completed, you will need to insert or import an elist structure (hierarchy) and insert or import rights to those elist items
- click the green arrow (GTP - Go To Production) and follow through the wizard.  Once completed you will have an application available from cognos connection

It's very useful to think about analyst as the foundation of what you're building.  You setup all the d-lists, d-cubes, d-links to satisfy the business requirements for data flow and then you build a contributor representation of this.  Any changes in analyst due to changing requirements needs to be synchronized with your contributor application.

You can find all of the PDF guides on the IBM website:
https://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27015693

Cheers!

[isap]

ericlfg - Thanks a million. I have created the go_expenses_contributor application (existing model). The next thing I wanna do is to create another application using the P&L model (self created). I am going to post the outcomes soon. Look forward to get some response. Thanks again.