Cognos 8 Enterprise Planning

Overview

Performance management begins with enterprise planning. And best-in-class performance begins with best-in-class enterprise planning software from Cognos.

Even for companies with the most complex business models, Cognos 8 Planning provides integrated operational and financial planning in real time, for immediate visibility into resource requirements and future business results.

Integrated planning software helps you build a foundation for higher performance across the enterprise.

• Define your goals —Create a clear-cut strategy for achieving best-in-class status.
• Plan for performance —Turn strategy into discrete plans and budgets for employees and external partners.
• Engage the organization —Provide real-time feedback to planning process participants.
• Connect operations and finance —Build strategic plans that maximize operational effectiveness and inform both operational and financial plans.
• Gain greater flexibility —Realign plans quickly as conditions change.
• Understand results —Manage performance by integrating your planning with industry-leading Cognos reporting and analysis.

Product Highlights

Generate weekly forecasts by department and compare against previous forecasts or prior year actuals.

• Cross-enterprise security for complete access control and single sign-on.
• Scales to thousands of participants.
• Performance management-enabled with integrated reporting, scorecarding, dashboards, and analysis.
• Distributed administration shares responsibility for maintaining enterprise plans.
• Built for continuous planning —daily, weekly, or monthly.
• Synchronizes and manages connected enterprise plans that link operational effectiveness and financial performance.
• Reflects cross-enterprise business activity, not just finance.
• Flexible deployment with a Web browser or Microsoft Excel interface.

Features and Benefits

Cognos Planning provides powerful business modeling and calculations that fit your business. You can deploy and control your plans in collaboration with thousands of users. Flexible security provides as much, or as little access as is required by each user in the enterprise.

Tailor models and plans to fit your business

Cognos 8 Planning uses actual and planning data to enable complete, multi-dimensional analysis of plans in real time.

• Cross-enterprise planning data stored in a single repository provides perpetually accurate information on-demand.
• Link personal spreadsheets to enterprise plans for auto-update of detailed or confidential information.
• Synchronized enterprise plans link operational and financial plans to show the impact of operational change on financial performance.
• "Break-back" helps users analyze "what-if" effects across time periods, product lines, or other parameters, with instantaneous feedback.
• Dynamic linking of individual plan components in real time facilitates consistency and accuracy.
• Quick commands allow users to modify plans and analyses, while an audit trail tracks all changes.
• Powerful business intelligence and scorecarding tools offered in Cognos 8 Business Intelligence produce detailed, multi-dimensional reports and analyses at the click of a mouse.

Streamlined workflow management

• Track participation easily to automatically monitor the planning process, participant status, and workflow status-not started, in progress, or ready for review-with intuitive, color-coded icons.
• Quick communication with collaborative features facilitates dialogue to shorten planning cycles while managers can email groups based on hierarchy or workflow status.
• Distributed administration shares role-based responsibility for planning across applications and processes.
• Rapid review through a customizable interface displays individual data submissions, all submissions, or a combination of both. Aggregate totals quickly to pinpoint areas that may need revision.
• Work offline without a network connection. Contributor automatically updates plans and forecasts when users check back in.
• Flexible planning means contributors can either save their work to return later, or submit it for review.
• Flexible security with pre-defined options ensure business units, workgroups, or individuals see only the templates that they require.