After a hiatus of three years, one of South Africa’s top business intelligence solution providers is re-entering the Gauteng market. Having focused on the country’s coastal regions, Synergy Business Intelligence – predominantly a provider of solutions based on IBM Cognos performance management software – has opened its premises in Bryanston.

Over the last 25 years, Synergy Business Intelligence has seen its partnership with IBM Cognos South Africa evolve from leading Business Intelligence (BI) solutions provider to today include the Financial Performance Management (FPM) discipline, allowing the company to realise its strategy of harnessing the value of data to its entrenched customer base.

Financial performance management, it must be said, is a pretty valid concept for almost every company in the current economic climate.

The management of Synergy Business Intelligence has acquired a controlling stake in the company after successfully completing a management buy-out from current owners, Sekunjalo TSG.

Financial Performance Management: More Relevant Than Ever 

The time has probably never been more appropriate for businesses to take into account the importance of financial performance management as part of their arsenal of decision support tools.  

 

The Bearing Man Group, Africa's leading distributor of dynamic engineering consumable products, has completed the first phase of its implementation of the Cognos 8 Business Intelligence (BI) suite with the assistance of Synergy Business Intelligence. The initiative is already delivering considerable benefits.

 

 

Companies which rely on information for their performance often face the challenge of data overload. For South African private client business BoE Private Clients, this issue came to a head as a result of its strong growth which rendered a previously reliable bespoke solution cumbersome and unreliable. The answer to its data processing requirements lay in IBM’s Cognos 8

Synergy is pleased to inform you about the IBM Cognos Performance 2009 event which will be taking place in Johannesburg and Cape Town in early November.

 

We highly recommend that you attend this event which will include product updates and sessions led by IBM Cognos technical experts as well as by customers who will present real-life case studies highlighting best practices for deployment optimization.


For information, and to register, click here.

IBM invites you to the IBM Cognos Virtual Finance Forum 2009 - our virtual conference and exposition for finance executives.

On Demand Web Seminar

Today more than ever, you need to make sure you are making the most of your data assets, by understanding the context of that data (meta data).
Please join us for this informative on demand web seminar to learn the necessary steps to ensure your meta data moves into and remains firmly in the 'High Quality' category.

SQL Server Data Warehousing Road Map: Build, Manage, Deliver, and Grow

by Aberdeen Group and Creativity Inc.

21 April 2009

Hear from the Aberdeen Group on their survey findings that shows the business justification for BI, and why it's essential to business success. And, learn how Creativity Inc. has improved their bottom line through their use of IBM Cognos 8 BI.
Are you delaying IT-related business initiatives, even cutting back on existing ones? Before you make that decision about Business Intelligence, attend this one hour on-demand webcast and:

In these turbulent economic times, you need to make better decisions, faster. You need to identify performance gaps, assess alternatives quickly and intelligently, and enable effective execution.

14 April 2009

You’ll hear how implementing data governance for your data warehouse can promote it to the trusted “single repository of truth” – giving you accurate and consistent data to help your organization thrive.
Data Governance for Data Warehouses: Helping Your Organization Thrive
Event date: Thursday, April 14 at 11 a.m. ET / 8 a.m. PT

25 March 2009

As you are now all aware, Cognos has been fully integrated into the IBM brand. We have decided, in order to keep you all abreast of the changes and what they entail, to host an event that will introduce our loyal customers to the new IBM Brand. You will have an opportunity to ask any questions you feel we have not addressed, product updates, who our team is and how it is structured, new contact information and much more.

Artcle written by Michael A. Schiff  and taken from TDWI website

Imagine trying to build your dream house without first creating a blueprint. The resulting structure would likely be an architectural nightmare with rooms that don’t fit together and electrical outlets, plumbing fixtures, and heating and air-conditioning vents that are don’t work or are not where you need them.

Article by Malcolm Chisholm, published in B-Eye-Network.com

One of the central problems of master data management, which is often poorly stated, is the need to determine if one individual thing is the same as another individual thing. But the only way we have to do this is by matching records, and a record is not the same as the thing it represents. Unlike The Matrix, we are more in danger of confounding two "realities" rather than recognizing them as distinct.

Article by Andy Hayler for B-Eye-Network.com

What is master data, and why should you care?

This article by Chris Bradley was taken from B-Eye-Network.com

Data modelling has been around since the mid 1970s; and for the last 30 years, I’ve been lucky (or not) to be involved in this field. When it first emerged it promised so much ...
“A single consistent definition of data”

“Master data records of reference”

“Reduced development time”

“Improved data quality”

“Impact analysis”

……and so on.

Who in their right mind would NOT want to have these benefits realised in their organisations? Surely they are no brainers?

Best-practice advice on software vs. coding, where to integrate, how to capture changed data, when to stage data, where to correct data and what latency levels to shoot for.

This October 2009 article by Bob Becker is taken from Intelligententerprise.com.

Download the steps on how to get a fix list for Cognos 8.2 , 8.3 and 8.4

How to use MUNS, Macros and dimensional functions to apply date prompts to OLAP data sources.

Enabling saving reports to the file system

It s not that hard, but it isn't enabled by default and you need to do some funny backend changes (not
too complicated, but does require some Cognos/IBM KB research .

Applies to Cognos 8.4 (maybe 8.3, hasn't been fully tested on 8.3)

Download Hot Tip Now

Technique for ‘Filling in the Blanks’ in Microsoft Excel

Sometimes we are given data in a spreadsheet that contains blanks and in order to process the data we need to repopulate the data appropriately.  With lots of data this can be very time consuming and sometimes near impossible.