Back in October we posted a Sales Cube Challenge TM1 Consultants and Developers could do to gauge themselves and their skill levels – Optionally readers could send their completed TM1 Servers back to us for feedback and advice. Now with IBM Cognos TM1 10 out we thought we’ve review one of the new components (IBM Cognos Insight) and what better data than the Sales Cube Challenge Data file.
Note: This will be a two post Review. In this post we will simply show you what data we used and how it all looks – Step by Step.
Exercise Sales Data: Sales Sample Data.xls
You can download it above if you want to step through this post with me.
First lets launch Insight and create a new Workspace. Its at this point (if you’ve also just finished installing TM1 10.1) that you realize IBM really like their splash screens.
Once you drag the sales challenge data onto Insight you’ll notice it is giving us a break down of each customer vs. each other. While not unexpected this doesn’t give us any actual Insight … Yet but simply pivoting the results around you can view Pivots such as “All Product Sales by Sales Channel” or “All Countries by Sales Channel”.
Once you are familiar with the Workspace its time to cleanup the Dimensions and Fix up a couple of data misinterpretations (Such as Customer ID and Name as two separate Dimensions) and build a Cool Sales Dashboard.
- Sales Dashboard (Sales Challenge Data)
So there you have it. A Dashboard that could have been made in 10min if I hadn’t been trying so hard to get under the hood and see how it all works. What I don’t show here is the dimension editor, rules editor and all the bells and whistles which let you do mappings, aliases and hierarchies etc on the fly. Stay tuned for the reviews conclusion.
