Replacing IBM Cognos Business Viewpoint for dimension and hierarchy management

On April 30, 2017, IBM announced that Cognos Business Viewpoint was discontinued from service.

IBM Cognos Business Viewpoint was dimension management software. It was designed to capture and manage multiple hierarchies, structures and definitions for use across performance management applications (EPM). Formerly part of the Cognos product line, Business Viewpoint was frequently used by TM1 customers to maintain standard and alternate financial hierarchies.

When a vendor chooses to discontinue a product the customer need scarcely vanishes--It's not as if former Business Viewpoint users have ceased managing their hierarchies and dimensions. For those users looking for a strategic path forward we would like to introduce our solution: EBX.

EBX is used by finance organizations to manage and govern their financial dimensions, standard and alternate hierarchies. Key features include:

Capabilities to create and maintain hierarchies

EBX provides hierarchy management capabilities that allow business users to model and manage complex hierarchies on any dimension. EBX supports all types of hierarchies, including balanced, unbalanced, ragged.

Just like Business Viewpoint, you can

• Create, edit, import, validate, compare dimensions, hierarchies and attributes

• From a dimension, create unlimited number of standard and alternate hierarchies

• Attach reference data to dimensions

• Manage past, current and future hierarchies

Unique to EBX are feature such as:

• Inherited hierarchies that enable one to adapt existing hierarchies into use case-specific, always-synced child hierarchies, and

• Business rules for validation and integrity controls

Built-in features for governance and collaboration

With built-in workflow engine and role-based security, EBX allows to configure processes for data onboarding, change requests and approvals. With version control features, users can manage past, present and future hierarchies (or sandboxes), adapt alternate hierarchies from standards, compare differences between hierarchies at point in time.

Just like Business Viewpoint, you can:

• Collaborate through workflows for change request, approval

• View a complete audit trail of all changes

• Manage versions for roll-back

Unique to EBX are feature such as:

• Work on future versions, compare and merge versions

• Configure fine-grained permissions at attribute and node levels, and

• Access to hierarchies and workflow tasks through a browser-based user interface or using a native iOS/Android app on mobile devices

Capabilities to share and synchronize

EBX comes with a full set of interfaces to share and integrate dimensions and hierarchies with downstream systems. Systems can be integrated through either client or server-side interfaces. Interfaces include:

• Real-time web services (SOAP/WSDL, REST/Json)

• File import/export (XLS, CSV, XML)

• SQL import/export

• Embedded screens in third-party web applications