Comparing Weekly Report Outputs to Monitor Changes

[ggustafson]

Good day. I have just started using Cognos in the past year for my company, so I'm still very much a beginner, so please bear with me. We are using a relational data source, and we have a customer that would like to be notified if any of the items they purchase are discontinued. Our items table has a field called ABC class that identifies the current status of any item for a given warehouse (A for top seller, down to F for discontinued items). The problem is that the items table does not store timestamps for changes made to the ABC class, so I cannot filter off of recent changes to the ABC class. I can create a list report that shows a current snapshot of the customer's historical items along with their current ABC class.  Is there a way to store that output and compare it on a weekly basis within Cognos?  For example, to run the report on Sundays and compare against the previous week's report to identify new items that have the "F" class in the past week?

I appreciate any tips or recommendations that you can offer.

Thank you.

[MFGF]

Good day. I have just started using Cognos in the past year for my company, so I'm still very much a beginner, so please bear with me. We are using a relational data source, and we have a customer that would like to be notified if any of the items they purchase are discontinued. Our items table has a field called ABC class that identifies the current status of any item for a given warehouse (A for top seller, down to F for discontinued items). The problem is that the items table does not store timestamps for changes made to the ABC class, so I cannot filter off of recent changes to the ABC class. I can create a list report that shows a current snapshot of the customer's historical items along with their current ABC class.  Is there a way to store that output and compare it on a weekly basis within Cognos?  For example, to run the report on Sundays and compare against the previous week's report to identify new items that have the "F" class in the past week?

I appreciate any tips or recommendations that you can offer.

Thank you.

Hi,

This sounds to me more like a requirement for Event Studio? If you set up an agent with an expression that evaluates to True for any F class rows, you can then set the action for New events (ie the first time this is true for a row) to send an alert or run a report or whatever you need the agent to do. Then schedule this agent to run weekly. Each time it runs it stores the current status, and then uses this as the previous to compare against for the next run.

Cheers!

MF.

[ggustafson]

Thank you for the quick response! We were looking into Event Studio functionality a couple weeks ago and our representative advised us not to begin using Event Studio because it wasn't included in the roadmaps released by IBM, so they weren't sure if support would continue for it going forwards. Do you know if this is accurate or if it is still advisable to depend on functionality in Event Studio?

Thank you.

[MFGF]

Thank you for the quick response! We were looking into Event Studio functionality a couple weeks ago and our representative advised us not to begin using Event Studio because it wasn't included in the roadmaps released by IBM, so they weren't sure if support would continue for it going forwards. Do you know if this is accurate or if it is still advisable to depend on functionality in Event Studio?

Thank you.

Hi,

I haven't heard of any plans to remove Event Studio. The capabilities it brings are an important differentiator, so I very much doubt IBM will get rid of them. I agree the UI is quite dated, though. My guess would be that IBM will update it at some point. Obviously I need to caveat this with a disclaimer that this is my own personal opinion and not any form of official statement from IBM or from my employer :)

Cheers!

MF.

[srmoure]

Is there any practical guide for event studio with case use scenarios.  I've been over the manual and couldn't understand how to use it in my organisation. I think it would be a great tool for automating exception reports to improve data quality. Current the exception reports are schedules at fixed frequencies, but triggering them when required would be more efficient.