products

Cognos Planning

For organizations that need to take operational and financial planning to a higher level, IBM Cognos 8 Planning provides unprecedented power and flexibility to turn sophisticated strategy into discrete plans, budgets, and forecasts.

IBM Cognos 8 Planning is a finance-managed solution that provides real-time visibility into resource requirements and forecasted business results. It supports best practices such as driver-based planning and rolling forecasts, and serves as the cornerstone for enterprise-wide performance management.

• Define your goals and communicate your strategy for achieving best-in-class status.
• Replace rigid, annual budgeting with continuous planning-daily, weekly, or monthly.
• Connect operations and finance through plans that maximize operational effectiveness and inform operational and financial plans.
• Engage the organization by enabling users to enter data in their own business language instead of unfamiliar financial terms. That makes it easy to model key business drivers.
• Gain greater flexibility by creating your own business rules and structures. Then modify your model as the organization evolves.
• Leverage investments in applications from Oracle and SAP by integrating planning with IBM Cognos reporting and analysis.
• Transform heterogeneous BI data sources into a business view with IBM Cognos Framework Manager and use them as data sources for IBM Cognos 8 Planning.

Product Highlights

• Driver-based planning model factors in the job status of an individual employee to determine total headcount cost by department and/or time period.
• Finance-managed solution with easy modeling language that can be used by financial analysts without IT involvement.
• Scales to thousands of participants to support top-down and bottom-up planning and forecasting.
• Supports best practices such as driver-based planning and rolling forecasts that speed planning cycles and increase accuracy.
• Multidimensional slicing-and-dicing, drill-down, and the exclusive break-back feature help you explore data fully and efficiently.
• Planners can attach any file type to a cell, model, or submission of a forecast to communicate the rationale and policies behind plans and forecasts.
• A separable component of the IBM Cognos 8 Performance Management Platform delivering planning, reporting, scorecarding, dashboards, analysis and financial consolidation and master dimensional management across your performance management system.
• Distributed administration shares the responsibility for planning processes across functions, geographies and business units within a secure, unified planning environment.
• Flexible deployment with Web browser or Microsoft Excel interface offers all the advantages of a dedicated enterprise solution with the familiarity and convenience of a spreadsheet.
• Flexible security with single sign-on provides appropriate access to each user.
• Sophisticated Built-In Functions make it easy to create powerful models and calculations.
• Increased personalization for users, including hierarchy support, sorting and hiding, freeze panes, user tab management, calendar selector, zoom, and word wrap. These capabilities enable planners to build persistent and sophisticated views of the organization and provide increased context for forecast data entry.
• Strong integration with the IBM Cognos 8 Performance Management Platform which includes IBM Cognos TM1, IBM Cognos 8 Controller, IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence and IBM Cognos 8 Business Viewpoint