Cognos Implementation for a Leading Aerospace Products and Services Company
Executive Summary:The company is a diversified technology and manufacturing leader of aerospace products and services; control technologies for buildings, homes and industry; automotive products; power generation systems; specialty chemicals; fibers; plastics and advanced materials. The company employs more than 100,000 people in 95 countries.Why Aviana and Cognos?The Aviana team's expertise with Cognos and Concur (T&E Solution) products was a major plus. The ability to coordinate with Cognos (as a Platinum Certified Partner) was another critical factor in the company's decision process. Aviana's reputation of doing implementations on time and on budget was also factored in. Aviana was asked to implement the following products for the project:
What was the Problem?The company was using Concur, a centrally managed Expense processing system. An Associate submits a travel/expense request to management. Management approves or rejects the request. Upon management approval, the planned expense is assigned a PTA (Pre-Trip Authorization) number. Once the associate generates the expense, they post those expenses against the PTA number using a web based interface that would list all available expenses from the charge card and allow the associate to assign them to the expense report. The Associate then submits the expenses for reimbursement. A back office Audit process evaluates the expenses against the company-defined policy to see that the expense meets the requirements. Once the expense report passes audit approval and management approval, it is approved for reimbursement. The reimbursement process will submit payment to the credit card provider for all approved corporate card expenses; and all approved out-of-pocket expenses will be paid via the associate's payroll check.
The data for the expense system is stored in a myriad of Oracle tables. These tables can be accessed via the Cognos Series 7 Business Intelligence software to generate back-office audit and management reports. Certain reports will be generated by directly accessing the databases using Cognos Report Studio® Queries. The reports will then be published monthly onto a web site as a way for customers to access their own reporting data. Ad hoc reporting requirements will be done by using Report Studio® web reports, analysis by creating expense data "cubes" using Cognos Power Play and publishing the cubes onto the same web site for users use data for analysis.
Aviana's SolutionAviana enabled the company to implement Cognos tools to build reports, analytical cubes and create alerts to provide management and employees with a total reporting solution. This allows the management to track, trend and analyze its travel and expense information across the various business units. The availability of this information enables the company to keep track of its expenses, provides for greater efficiency in processing expense reports, enables it to monitor compliance to company expense policies, and also enables detection of fraudulent usage of company provided credit card.
 Benefits to Customer
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