Cognos Planning

For organizations looking to improve both operational and financial planning, Cognos 8 Planning provides unprecedented power and flexibility to turn sophisticated strategy into discrete plans, budgets, and forecasts.

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.


Overview:
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.

Product highlights:

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.
A high performance SAP BW connector moves large volumes of data to meet the needs of complex planning solutions.
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.

ANALYST - Modelling and data analysis
Model creation in couple of days, NOT in months
Import data definitions from other resources (ERP, DWH, CRM systems, etc.)
NO programming – model can be created and deployed without IT department, NO programming
Change business logic and principles quickly and easily in real time
Elimination of non-value added process activities like number gathering and consolidation, error finding and correction etc.
Connection of spreadsheets with planning system
"Break-back" helps users analyze "what-if" effects across time periods, product lines, or other parameters, with instantaneous feedback

CONTRIBUTOR - Distribution and budget contribution
GO production process - easy transfer planning models from creation phase to contribution phase
… usage widely enforcered standards and system open architecture
Easily define access rights for enach budget item
Interface between access rights and company organization structure

WORKFLOW - Process control
Workflow support of whole planning process
Easily define who contribute and who review particular plan items

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