software

operational and financial planning

For organizations looking to improve both operational and financial planning, 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 future business results. It supports best practices such as driver-based planning and rolling forecasts, and serves as the cornerstone for enterprise-wide performance management.

integrated planning software helps you achieve higher performance across the enterprise

  • 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. Build plans that maximize operational effectiveness and inform both operational and financial plans.
  • 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.
  • Leverage your investment in applications from Oracle and SAP by integrating planning with Cognos reporting and analysis.
  • Cognos Framework Manager can access multiple data sources into a business view that can be used as a data source for IBM Cognos 8 Planning.

product highlights

  • Finance-owned solution with an easy modeling language that can be developed 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..
  • Part of an integrated but separable performance management system delivering planning, reporting, scorecarding, dashboards, analysis, and financial consolidation.
  • 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.