Performance Management

Value

The real value of performance management is found in the seamless way that decision-makers can move among the three fundamental business questions: How are we doing? Why? and What should we be doing? Ideally, the answers to these questions should be based on a common understanding of metrics, data dimensions, data definitions, and views of the organization.

Yet much of the established technology people rely on (spreadsheets, databases, and specialized systems) has grown up to support only one question at a time. Spreadsheets in particular, while valuable for personal productivity, were not designed for and cannot cope with critical business processes on an enterprise scale. The result is a deficit of truly useful information for decision making. And this deficit compromises higher performance.

Cognos offers the consistent, integrated technology platform that is vital to effective performance management. Our solutions deliver the integrated planning, consolidation, query and reporting, analysis, and metrics management capabilities necessary for better decision making across the enterprise.

With improved performance management, companies can find new opportunities to increase revenue and profits, hold down costs, and better manage working capital. Cognos has helped companies:

Set budgets and allocate spending for different areas of design and testing in order to make the most efficient investments.
Optimize quantity planning procedures to account for shifting market trends.
Gain better understanding of key drivers and risk profiles within the business.
Adjust for local labor conditions as well as international trends.

Cognos provides the technology and the expertise to address your immediate business needs. But we also have the vision to take the organization as a whole to a higher level of financial and operational performance.

The Cognos Performance Management Roadmap
Performance management goes beyond applying a collection of tools to discrete tasks. At Cognos, we believe that effective financial performance management demands both the right tools and a well-designed strategy for getting the best possible performance from your organization.

The Cognos approach is embodied in our Performance Management Roadmap—a four-step progression from the automation of specific business functions to the transformation of the business as a whole. The roadmap is based on our long experience in a variety of industries. It reflects the best practices developed and proven throughout the lifecycle of customer implementations and it is designed to offer minimum risk and maximum business value.

There are four steps in the Performance Management Roadmap:

Automate the process—Employ state-of-the-art technology to make existing processes run faster and smoother, saving time, cost and freeing people for value-adding activities.
Drive best practices—Effective planning and consolidation by the Finance organization is at the heart of performance management. Our technology and industry expertise can help you establish clear best practices such as driver-based planning and rolling forecasts.
Extend beyond Finance—The best practices that are developed in the Finance organization can align operational plans with financial targets and lead the way to better performance management throughout the enterprise.
Advance performance management for strategy execution—Leverage a single technology platform to forge reliable and continuous connections between strategy, financial management and operational execution.

When you fully realize the goal of Performance Management, your resources, activities and plans are aligned with corporate objectives. You can stay consistently up to date, with timely insights into past, present, and future operating performance. You have real-time visibility into your operations and are better able to focus on the value-driving activities necessary to achieve your corporate goals.

Strategic objectives are translated into initiatives linked to key performance indicators and communicated to all the right people. Initiatives, in turn, are linked to resources and processes throughout the organization. You identify opportunities, affect outcomes, and quickly make decisions that are aligned with corporate strategy. And people throughout the organization are able to see how their contributions support that strategy. The result is better, more consistent operational execution.

Learn more about the Cognos Performance Management Roadmap
Learn about Cognos Performance Management Solutions

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Turning BI into Performance

See how Oracle application users saw the scope and adoption of performance management in this OAUG survey. For information on becoming an OAUG member and the benefits of membership, visit OAUG at www.oaug.org.

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