IBM Cognos 8 Planning

Overview

For organisations 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. From single user systems in a single location to thousands of users spread across the globe operating in multiple time zones in multiple currencies, Cognos 8 Planning is easy to deploy and powerful enough to budget and forecast the most complex of businesses.

IBM Cognos 8 Planning is a business managed solution that provides real-time visibility into resource requirements and forecasted business results. That means that the business manages and owns the planning applications rather than the IT department or a third party supplier. It supports best practices such as driver-based planning and rolling forecasts, and serves as the cornerstone for enterprise-wide performance management.
IBM Cognos Planning links straight to your GL system so you won’t have to re-key any of your data, plus it can link to other systems you have too, like HR, so you can do headcount planning.

If your business uses spreadsheets, then using Cognos Planning will seem very intuitive and your team will be able to build a budgeting or forecasting system very quickly, with expert help and guidance from Innovar’s accredited and experienced Cognos Planning consultants.
For other department heads, instead of complex, multi-sheet spreadsheets, you can ask them to log on to a web page where they can update their forecasts or budgets and you will have the benefit of the figures consolidating immediately. No more sending out spreadsheets and waiting for them to come back in to be consolidated. Stop wasting time on the process, and start concentrating on the figures.

Integrated planning software helps you achieve higher performance throughout the enterprise.

Explore the IBM Cognos 8 Planning Interface.

• 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 organisation 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 organisation evolves.
• Get the most from your investments in applications from Oracle and SAP by integrating planning with Cognos reporting and analysis.
• Transform multiple 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 modelling 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.
• 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 personalisation 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 Cognos 8 Performance Management Platform so that you can link to IBM’s world class Business Intelligence tools.