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.

• 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 IBM Cognos reporting and analysis.
• IBM 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.

• 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.