IBM Cognos® 8 Planning is enterprise planning software that helps you develop budgets and forecasts faster and more efficiently.

Create, compare and evaluate business scenarios, conditions, drivers, rates and assumptions and use best practices such as driver-based planning and rolling forecasting to determine resource requirements, operating performance and future business results in real time.

• Make decisions instead of debating definitions and accuracy of multiple spreadsheets with a unified view of plan data that connects with key metrics and information.
• Proceed from what-is to evaluate “what-if” scenarios critical to enterprise planning, developing budgets and forecasting future performance with sophisticated modeling instead of spreadsheets.
• Eliminate unproductive activities such as tracking down numbers, fixing broken links and debugging macros.
• Create better visibility of likely operating performance using driver-based planning and flexible rolling forecasts.
• Import data definitions from sources such as ERP systems so you can build models in days, not months.
• Add power and sophistication to your business models with rich built-in functions.
• Manage the solution without the need for arcane programming languages or scripting. No IT input is required.
• Quickly explore data, evaluate models, test assumptions and compare current performance with historical actuals and external benchmarks using drill-down and multidimensional cube slicing-and-dicing.
• Enable greater participation, collaboration and commitment with user-friendly Web browser and familiar Microsoft® Excel® interfaces

Features and benefits

Contributor Web client offers personalization features including: hierarchy support, sorting and hiding, freeze panes, zoom and more. Savvy organizations use integrated planning, forecasting and analysis to achieve outstanding performance. IBM Cognos® 8 Planning offers everything you need to establish a foundation for best-in-class performance, no matter how complex your business model. A state-of-the-art, highly scalable solution, it integrates operational and financial planning in real time so you can see your resource requirements and your future business performance.

With Cognos 8 Planning, you can build enterprise-wide plans, budgets and forecasts faster and more efficiently. Create, compare and evaluate business scenarios, conditions, drivers, rates and assumptions. Proceed from “what-is” to evaluate what-if scenarios critical to forecasting future performance.

Cognos 8 Planning provides the power, flexibility and integrated workflow you need to:

• Spend your time making business decisions, not debating accuracy
• Create plans and models to fit your business needs
• Develop sophisticated linked models that accurately reflect your business in all its detail
• Import enterprise data to develop effective plans
• Adapt best practices such as driver-based planning and flexible rolling forecasts