IBM Cognos 8 Planning

Overview

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.

Explore the IBM Cognos 8 Planning Interface.

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 transforms heterogeneous BI data sources into a business view that can be used as a data source for IBM Cognos 8 Planning.

Product Highlights

Driver-based planning model factors in the job status of an individual employee to determine total headcount cost by department and/or time period.

Finance-owned solution with 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.

Learn More:

Additional Resources:

IBM Cognos 8 Planning: Agility to Transform Your Business

Online Demo

Learn how to improve your performance through planning, budgeting, and forecasting with IBM Cognos 8 Planning.

Planning and Forecasting: Use Continuous Planning and Rolling Forecasts to Support Adaptive Management

White Paper

Learn how to use continuous planning and rolling forecasts to support adaptive management

David Axson: Building a more flexible Office of Finance

Podcast

Renowned author and Innovation Center advisor David Axson explains why traditional forecasting practices are obsolete, how to liberate analysts from their spreadsheets, and the value of benchmarking in performance management.

Selecting the Right Enterprise Planning Solution: Considerations for Software Evaluators

White Paper

This handbook provides a list of key factors that you should consider as you evaluate competing enterprise planning solutions.

Dynamic Planning for Today's Uncertain World

White Paper

This article discusses transforming the planning process to make it simple, flexible, short, and relevant to today’s dynamic business environment.

Spreadsheet-Based Planning: Rough Road Ahead

White Paper

Read how using spreadsheets for planning can cost you more than lost productivity, but can actually cast doubt on the integrity of plans.

IBM Cognos Management and Financial Reporting Performance Blueprint Application Brief

Application Brief

The Application Brief shows how IBM Cognos 8 Controller and IBM Cognos 8 BI work together to provide enterprise-level financial management and control capabilities including reporting, analysis, metrics, and event management.

Looking Ahead - Leveraging Financial Consolidation and Enterprise Planning

Web Seminar On-Demand

Managing the business looking forward - ensuring the right level of allocated resources and investment across the business - is paramount in today's fast moving, global and highly competitive environment. Whether you are planning for operational effectiveness or strictly for financial management, measuring cause and effect requires financial measures and metrics. Accurate and validated financial data in the financial consolidation system is an integral part of this conversation. In this session we will discuss the importance of planning in world class companies, and the intersection value of the close, consolidate, report and planning processes.

Forecast Acurracy and Investor Opinion

Podcast

Exclusive interview with Deloitte and Baxter.