Chapter 5. Modeling Your Key Performance Measures - IBM Cognos User Manual

Chapter 5. Modeling Your Key Performance Measures

In your Cognos Transformer model, you must include the key measures required
to gauge the performance of your organization. Quantity of items sold and profit
margin are examples of such performance indicators.
A model can contain any number of regular or calculated measures, together with
logical groupings that use measure folders. A regular measure is numeric data in a
transactional data source. A calculated measure is new numeric data that is derived
from other measures, functions, and constants, such as Profit, which is calculated
from the measures Revenue and Cost. A measure folder can group existing
measures into a logical collection and, if needed, can be assigned a calculated
value itself.
In this model, the Measures list contains both regular measures (Revenue, Product
cost and Quantity) and a calculated measure (Profit Margin).
To perform calculations on a measure, you create mathematical expressions based
on an extensive list of available functions. For more information, see "Cognos
Transformer Functions" on page 99 and Appendix F, "IBM Cognos Transformer
Expression Editor," on page 355.
Report users generally want to see their measure data summarized across one or
more time periods, such as monthly or quarterly. You can apply different types of
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