Planning
IBM® Cognos® 8 Planning is a finance-managed solution for planning, budgeting and forecasting.
IBM Cognos 8 Planning serves as the cornerstone for enterprise-wide financial performance management. It provides you with real-time visibility into resource requirements and future business results and supports proven best practices such as driver-based planning and rolling forecasts.
Replace rigid, annual budgeting with continuous planning - daily, weekly or monthly. Engage the organization. Users enter data in their own business language instead of unfamiliar financial terms - making it easy to model key business drivers. Gain greater flexibility. Create your own business rules and structures - then modify your model as the organization evolves. Scale to thousands of participants to support top-down and bottom-up planning and forecasting.
Streamline Workflow
Collaborative features facilitate communication to shorten planning cycles and enable managers to e-mail groups based on hierarchy or workflow status.
Reviewers can quickly monitor workflow status - not started, in progress or ready for review - with intuitive, color-coded icons.
Distributed administration shares role-based responsibility for planning across functions, geographies, and business units.
Corporate policies are enforced with validation rules that review data entry values prior to submission.
Continuous feedback loop minimizes the multiple iterations and negotiations that can slow down - or even shut down - the planning process.
Automatic aggregation displays the impact of new forecasts and plan contributions in real time to let you pinpoint gaps at a glance. No overnight batch processing.
Analysis
Drill-down and multidimensional slicing-and-dicing help you explore data, evaluate models, and test assumptions in minutes. Quickly compare current performance with historical actuals and external benchmarks.
“Break-back” automatically spreads high-level targets across any profile, such as previous-period actuals or projected seasonality, and across multiple dimensions such as products, customers, territories, or time periods.
Unified view of plan data connects with key metrics and information so you can make decisions instead of debating definitions and accuracy.
Eliminate unproductive activities such as tracking down numbers, fixing broken links and debugging macros.
Plan Creation
Sophisticated modelling capabilities let you create linked models that accurately reflect cross-functional interdependencies.
Build models in days, not months. Import data definitions from sources such as ERP systems.
Change underlying business logic and principles quickly and easily. Compare alternatives and assess the impact in real time.
Driver-based planning and flexible rolling forecasts provide greater visibility into likely operating performance.
Finance manages the solution without the need for arcane programming languages or scripting. No IT input is required.
Take advantage of rich Built-In Functions to add power and sophistication to your business models.
Controller
IBM Cognos® 8 Controller offers complete financial reporting and consolidation - all in one solution.
Automate your entire close process with a full suite of consolidation capabilities that deliver a complete portfolio of financial results and an integrated business intelligence platform for financial and management reporting and analysis.
Prepare and consolidate financial information in a centralized, controlled, compliant environment to ensure the end-to-end completion of the close process. Put finance users in control with self-service, automation and reporting and analysis functionality.Manage, control and certify financial statement reporting.Evaluate financial results with confidence and accuracy for multiple countries, currencies and legal entities, each with their own accounting policies intact.Support better planning and forecasting with reliable consolidated management data, based on a clear link between statutory and management consolidation.