IBM Cognos Disclosure Management (CDM) is essentially an upgrade to IBM Cognos Financial Statement Reporting (FSR). Built using the same logic, the IBM Product Team gathered FSR end user feedback to produce the next major version of the product, and CDM was the result. With an updated architecture, significantly improved performance, an Office 2010 look and feel, and several other enhancements, CDM takes FSR to the next level of Disclosure Management and Financial Statement Reporting.

Now that CDM is more than 1 year removed from its initial (November 2012) release, it’s important that all organizations using FSR start making their plans to migrate over to CDM. The improvement in performance alone will have users working at a much more efficient rate and CDM will prove to be a much lighter application on the end user PC. No longer do users find themselves going for coffees while a report generates or sitting around while an object opens. The newly introduced Application Server (which most other applications already have) will take on the bulk of the work, allowing users to continue to work in CDM while processes are being completed.

 

FSR to CDM Comparison:

 

The migration from FSR to CDM itself does not require a tremendous amount of consulting effort. In fact, depending on the size of your reports and the data sourcing methods, you could have your Annual and Quarterly reports migrated from FSR to CDM much quicker than you would expect. The migration steps are outlined in the diagram below:

The Migration Utility is an automated process that migrates an FSR report into a CDM report. All of the FSR report sections, objects, content and variables are migrated during this process.

Given the backend re-engineering of the data sourcing process in CDM, there will be a need to re-source the data at the application level. This is really an ideal time to take a look at your data sourcing method in FSR (likely Excel) and move towards a more seamless process feeding data directly from your source systems (ie. TM1, Essbase Analysis Services, HFM, a GL, a DW, etc). Since the sourcing has to be re-created from scratch when migrating to CDM, this is an ideal time to make that change.

Finally, workflows and security settings have to be set up in your new CDM environment to complete the migration. Due to the change in the backend processes, these pieces are not automatically migrated using the utility. Workflow templates will be created and distributed, and application/report permissions need to be setup individually.

With a small amount of effort, your reports are now migrated from FSR to CDM and are ready for roll forward and live use. You may have an inclination to run CDM in parallel with FSR for some time – and IBM allows you the luxury of doing so for up to 1 year – but a maximum of 1 quarter of parallel runs will be sufficient. Once you enjoy the performance and efficiencies of CDM, it’s tough to go back and work in FSR.

 

How Delbridge Solutions can help:

 

Delbridge’s Executive team has led some of the largest Cognos FSR implementations and understands what it takes to migrate clients to Cognos CDM. All of our clients are referenceable. We can assist you with:

  • Creation of internal and external reports
  • Best practices in report design
  • Report automation using variables, business rules, objects
  • Creation of your company specific XBRL taxonomy for tagging
  • Tagging assistance
  • Validation and test filing assistance
  • Best Practices in XBRL tagging process