Steakburger Extraordinaire

[larsonr]

Greetings all,

My name is Bob Larson.  I work for the Steak n Shake Company.  We've been using Cognos products since 2004, but our first implementation failed due to unfamiliarity with PowerPlay as well as the divided resources of staff.  I came on board in 2006 (was a store manager with no prior Cognos experience) into the existing PowerPlay environment (1 and half staff members) where I gained more experience with Transformer than I could ever hope for.

Since last June though, we've been using Cognos 8.  What an eye opener.  We now have 3 dedicated staff members to our BI initiative.  One guy on Data Warehousing and Decision Stream, the other  (new hire as of 2 months ago) on the metadata modeling with Framework and designing of user friendly Query Studio packages, and then myself -- Report Author, System Administrator, SDK developer. 

Supporting more than 2000 users, I think we've come a long way in one year, but there is so much more room to grow.  I'm looking forward to gaining more education from all the topics posted on this site and hope that everyone finds my comments helpful as well.

Right now, my focus on reports has been trying to build something quicker than those in our old Crystal environment as well as build new functionality into the Cognos tool where it lacks pieces we are being requested of by end users.

Glad to meet everyone and look forward to more postings.