Turn sophisticated business strategy into discrete plans, budgets and forecasts.

Overview

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.

Features and Benefits

IBM® Cognos® 8 Planning enables finance organizations with even the most complex business models to build enterprise-wide plans, budgets and forecasts faster and more efficiently.

You can 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. The result: improved predictability and greater accountability across the enterprise.

• Create plans and models to fit your business needs
• Spend less time on process, more time on analysis
• Enable high participation across the enterprise
• Plan to extend ERP performance
• Streamlined workflow management

Create plans and models to fit your business needs

• Sophisticated modeling 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 applications from Oracle and SAP via certified integration to SAP NetWeaver applications.
• 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.

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Spend less time on process, more time on 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.

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Enable high participation across the enterprise

• User-friendly Web browser or familiar Microsoft® Excel® interface require minimal training and encourage participation, collaboration and commitment.
• Single sign-on provides immediate access to linked, role-specific planning templates while pre-defined rules ensure that individuals see only the templates they require.
• Distributed architecture is optimized for end-user performance, even with thousands of concurrent users across divisions and geographies.
• Complex calculations at the client give users instantaneous response and eliminate unnecessary traffic and server consumption during high-use periods.
• Users enter information in their own business language—not finance terms—and predefined formulas translate that into financial data such as gross revenue, net income, or earnings per share.
• Users can work offline. Plans and forecasts are automatically updated when they check back in.
• Online administration makes it easy to change data structures, user rights, model parameters, and more—24x7—without taking the system offline.
• Advanced personalization features blend planning and analysis to improve user productivity and accuracy and empower uses to take greater control of their view of the planning process. New features include: hierarchy support, sorting and hiding, freeze panes, user tab management, calendar selector, zoom and word wrap.

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Plan to extend ERP performance

• Extend applications from Oracle and SAP via certified integration to SAP NetWeaver applications.
• Cross-enterprise planning data stored in a single repository provides perpetually accurate information on demand.
• Synchronized enterprise plans link operational and financial plans to show the impact of operational change on financial performance.
• Dynamic linking of individual plan components in real time facilitates consistency and accuracy.
• Planners can attach files to a cell, model or submission of a forecast.
• Quick commands allow users to modify plans and analyses, while an audit trail tracks all changes.
• Powerful business intelligence and scorecarding tools in IBM® Cognos® 8 Business Intelligence produce detailed, multi-dimensional reports and analyses.

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Streamlined workflow management

• 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.