Migrate Concur Cognos reports — Standard Reports, Intelligence, Analysis Studio, scheduled distributions and bursting — to Oracle Fusion OTBI for self-serve and BIP for pixel-perfect operational output. Inventory, classify, build, parallel-run, cut over.
The expense data port is solvable in weeks. The Cognos report port is the long pole — because every finance, audit, tax, HR and operations team has running reports nobody catalogued.
SAP Concur — acquired by SAP in 2014 — embeds Cognos as its reporting and analytics layer. Concur Intelligence (the standard reporting package) ships with 40–60 out-of-the-box reports covering expense detail, exception summary, policy violation, top spender, tax recovery, cost-centre rollup and corporate-card reconciliation. Customers extend it with custom Cognos packages — Analysis Studio workbooks, Report Studio reports, scheduled bursting distributions — until a typical mid-large enterprise has 80–150 distinct reports in production.
Concur report migration replaces all of that on Oracle Fusion. OTBI is the right target for self-serve, ad-hoc, drag-and-drop reporting (about 60% of the inventory). BIP is the right target for pixel-perfect operational and statutory output, including scheduled bursting (about 40%). A few Analysis Studio workbooks land on Power BI or Tableau because OTBI's multi-dimensional pivot isn't a clean substitute. Choosing the right target per report is the first material decision in concur report migration.
Syntra ETL's concur report migration delivery brings pre-built OTBI templates and BIP layouts for the common Concur Standard Reports, an automated Cognos catalogue extract for inventory and classification, an automated parallel-run reconciliation harness for variance detection, and a URL redirect service for zero-broken-link cutover. The realistic timeline is 8–14 weeks; the realistic effort is 80–250 person-days; the realistic outcome is consumer satisfaction at or above the Concur baseline.
Each work stream is sequenced and tracked separately so a typical 80-report migration stays predictable.
Automated Cognos catalogue extract — report ID, owner, last-run date, run frequency, subscribers, output format. Classify Active / Dormant / Obsolete. Confirm migration scope.
Per-report decision: OTBI for self-serve drag-and-drop, BIP for pixel-perfect operational and statutory output, Power BI/Tableau for deep multi-dimensional pivot.
OTBI Analyses and Dashboards. BIP data models, RTF/XSL templates, scheduled jobs with bursting rules. Pre-built Syntra templates cut effort ~30%.
Each report runs in parallel for one fiscal cycle. Row-by-row variance comparison. Sub-threshold variance passes; over-threshold triggers root cause.
Cognos report URL → OTBI/BIP URL map. Lightweight redirect service catches old bookmarks. Subscribers notified at cutover with new URL.
Per-team walkthroughs — finance (60 min), audit (60 min), tax (60 min), HR (30 min). OTBI self-serve enablement workshop for power users.
From Cognos catalogue extract to OTBI/BIP cutover, typically 8–14 weeks for an 80–150 report inventory.
Automated Cognos catalogue extract. Owner sign-off on Active / Dormant / Obsolete classification. Migration scope locked. URL inventory captured for redirect map.
OTBI subject area mapping confirmed against Fusion Expenses data model. BIP data model patterns chosen. Power BI/Tableau exception list confirmed. Re-usable templates set up.
First wave: the 40–60 Concur Standard Reports. Syntra pre-built OTBI and BIP templates accelerate. Per-report effort 0.5–2 days. Phase 1 typically completes 60–80 reports.
Second wave overlapping Phase 1: custom Cognos reports, Analysis Studio translations, edge cases. Higher per-report effort 1–4 days. Phase 2 typically completes 30–70 reports.
Each report runs in parallel for one fiscal cycle. Automated variance harness compares Cognos output to OTBI/BIP output. Over-threshold variance investigated and resolved before sign-off.
URL redirect service live. Subscriber notifications sent. OTBI/BIP becomes authoritative. Cognos reports decommissioned one fiscal cycle later as final safety net.
Six common failure modes — and how Syntra ETL's concur report migration approach avoids each.
Reports nobody catalogued surface during cutover. Syntra's automated Cognos catalogue extract captures every published report, schedule and subscriber up-front.
OTBI used where BIP belonged (or vice versa) — re-work later. Syntra's per-report classification matrix gets the OTBI/BIP/Power BI decision right in week 2.
Reports go live with silent variance. Audit catches it months later. Syntra's automated row-by-row variance harness blocks cutover until variance is within threshold.
Cognos URLs all over SharePoint and SOPs go dead at cutover. Syntra's URL redirect service catches every legacy URL with a one-time banner explanation.
Bursting distributions stop arriving and finance learns about it from angry consumers. Syntra's schedule-port checklist converts every Cognos schedule to a BIP scheduled job.
OTBI feels foreign to Cognos-trained users. Syntra delivers per-team walkthroughs and a self-serve enablement workshop for power users.
Concur report migration is the work of taking SAP Concur's Cognos-based reports — Standard Reports, Intelligence reports, custom Cognos packages, scheduled distributions and Analysis Studio workbooks — and rebuilding equivalent reporting on Oracle Fusion (OTBI for self-serve, BIP for pixel-perfect operational output) once expense data lives in Fusion Expenses. It's the hardest part of a Concur project because the data model is different (Concur Intelligence model vs Fusion Expenses subject areas), the report tooling is different (Cognos drag-and-drop and authoring vs OTBI/BIP), and the consumer audience is broader than IT realises — finance leadership, business-unit controllers, audit, tax and HR all have running Cognos reports that nobody catalogued. Concur report migration done well takes 8–14 weeks and surfaces 80–150 distinct reports in a typical mid-large enterprise.
Concur Intelligence (the embedded Cognos reporting) tracks every published report, every scheduled distribution and every saved query against the Concur data model. Syntra's concur report migration kickoff starts with an automated Cognos catalogue extract: report ID, name, owner, last-run date, last-run user, run frequency, subscriber list, output format (PDF/Excel/CSV) and underlying Cognos package. Reports are then classified — Active (run in last 90 days, has subscribers), Dormant (run 90–365 days ago), Obsolete (no run in 12+ months). Active reports become migration scope; Dormant reports get owner-confirmation before migration scope decision; Obsolete reports are retired with notification. Typical inventory: 80–150 total, 40–70 active, 30–60 dormant, the rest obsolete.
Yes. Scheduled distribution and bursting (one report run produces multiple personalised outputs delivered to different recipients — e.g. per-cost-centre expense summary to each cost-centre owner) are common Cognos patterns that have to land somewhere on Fusion. BIP supports bursting natively and is the right target for these reports. Syntra's concur report migration delivery converts each Cognos schedule (frequency, time window, recipient list, delivery channel) to a BIP scheduled job with matching frequency and bursting rules. Recipient lists port over as BIP distribution lists or, where dynamic, as parameterised queries against HCM data. Output formats (PDF/Excel/CSV) match the Cognos original so consumers see no change.
OTBI (Oracle Transactional Business Intelligence) is the right target for self-serve, ad-hoc, drag-and-drop reporting against Fusion Expenses subject areas — finance teams running spend-by-cost-centre, audit running policy-violation samples, tax running per-jurisdiction VAT extracts. BIP (BI Publisher) is the right target for pixel-perfect operational output — board-pack expense summaries, statutory tax reports, scheduled bursting distributions, regulatory PDF templates. Concur report migration starts with audience and use-case classification: who consumes the report, how often, what output format, is it for further analysis or final delivery. Active self-serve consumers go to OTBI; final-delivery production reports go to BIP. About 60% land in OTBI and 40% in BIP in a typical migration.
Analysis Studio workbooks (Concur's analyst-friendly cross-tab drill exploration tool) translate to OTBI Analyses with hierarchical column drill, sub-totals, exception highlighting and column-level conditional formatting. The translation isn't pixel-perfect — Cognos Analysis Studio has more cross-tab pivoting flexibility than OTBI — but the functional output (the analyst question being answered) ports cleanly. Where an Analysis Studio workbook is doing something OTBI genuinely can't (deep multi-dimensional pivot with mid-pivot calculated members), the answer is usually a Power BI or Tableau dashboard fed from the Fusion REST API rather than forcing it into OTBI. Concur report migration scoping calls those out early so consumers aren't surprised.
Concur Cognos report URLs are bookmarked in browsers, embedded in SharePoint pages, linked in finance team SOPs and dropped into email signatures across the organisation. Concur report migration delivery includes a URL redirect map: every Cognos report URL maps to the equivalent OTBI/BIP report URL on Fusion. A lightweight redirect service (or DNS-level redirect rule) catches the old URLs and routes consumers to the new home with a one-time banner explaining the change. Subscriber lists for scheduled reports get a notification email at cutover with the new bookmark. The result: zero broken-link complaints in the first week after cutover, which is a strong signal of concur report migration success.
Yes — and you should. Each migrated report runs in parallel for at least one full reporting cycle (typically one fiscal month for routine reports, one fiscal quarter for executive board-pack reports). Syntra's concur report migration delivery includes automated reconciliation: same period, same filters, same output, with row-by-row variance comparison between Cognos output and OTBI/BIP output. Variance over threshold (typically 0.01% on monetary fields, 0 rows on count fields) triggers root-cause analysis. Reports pass parallel-run when variance is within threshold across the entire reporting cycle. Only then does the report cut over to OTBI/BIP as authoritative; the Cognos version is decommissioned a fiscal period later.
8–14 weeks elapsed; 80–250 person-days of effort depending on report count and complexity. Inventory and classification: 1–2 weeks. OTBI/BIP target architecture: 1 week (re-usable across the project). Per-report build effort: 0.5 day for simple OTBI tabular reports, 2–4 days for complex BIP pixel-perfect with bursting, 1–2 days for typical Analysis Studio translation. Parallel-run reconciliation: 2–4 weeks across the report population. Cutover: 1 week. Total for a typical 80-report migration is around 80–120 person-days; for a 150-report migration it's 150–250 person-days. Syntra's concur report migration accelerators (pre-built OTBI templates and BIP layouts for the common Concur Standard Reports) cut that by roughly 30%.
Syntra ETL's concur report migration delivery — automated Cognos inventory, OTBI/BIP target architecture, pre-built templates, parallel-run reconciliation and URL redirect — gets you from 80–150 Cognos reports to a clean Fusion reporting estate in 8–14 weeks.