Cognos Planning - Overview

PERFORMANCE BEGINS WITH ENTERPRISE PLANNING
Cognos Planning offers everything you need to establish a foundation for best-in-class performance. Owned by the business rather than IT, it helps define goals and creates a clear-cut strategy for excellence. It gives you the tools to turn strategy into discrete plans, budgets, and forecasts for employees and external partners.
Designed for companies with even the most complex business models, Cognos Planning is a fully integrated, state-of- the-art, highly scalable solution for planning, budgeting and forecasting. Cognos Planning integrates operational and financial planning in real time for immediate visibility into resource requirements and future business performance. Its distributed administration capabilities enable localized responsibility for plan processes across functions, geographies, and business units in a single, unified, secure planning environment.

Cognos Planning provides unprecedented power and flexibility to create, compare, and evaluate business scenarios, conditions, drivers, rates, and assumptions. It enables you to build consistent, interconnected business models for organisations of any size. With Cognos Planning, you can access current actual data to assess fiscal performance, and proceed from "what-is" to evaluate the "what-if" scenarios critical to forecasting future performance. And Cognos Planning helps you build enterprise-wide budgets and forecasts faster and more efficiently. The result? True predictability and accountability across the enterprise.

POWERFUL BUSINESS MODELLING AND CALCULATION (Analyst)
Customised for Your Business
Rather than forcing you into a solution that may not fit your business model, Cognos Planning easily adapts to suit your organisation and business environment. You can create your own business rules and structures in the Cognos Planning architecture and then modify your model as the organisation evolves. Cognos Planning easily accommodates changes such as added locations, new or discontinued product lines, and restructured cost centres. As your business grows, Cognos Planning grows with it. Its powerful modelling capabilities give you flexibility to devise, compare, and assess alternative business scenarios, conditions, cases, and assumptions. And since Cognos Planning is designed for business professionals, you won’t need IT to alter your model for you.

• Rapid development. Cognos Planning lets you build a model in days—not months. And you can import data definitions from sources like ERP or general ledger systems to further accelerate the process.
• Sophisticated modelling. Cross-functional planning processes rely on complex logic and dependencies. The modelling capabilities in Cognos Planning quickly deliver sophisticated linked models that accurately reflect your business in all its complexity and detail.
• Flexibility. No other enterprise planning solution provides the modelling flexibility of Cognos Planning. You can change underlying business logic and principles quickly and easily, and see the impact in real time.
• Business friendliness. Cognos Planning doesn’t require you to master arcane programming languages or scripting. Control of the application remains with business professionals—not IT, as required by other solutions.

SPEND LESS TIME ON PROCESS, MORE ON ANALYSIS (Analyst & Contributor)
The proprietary high-speed, bi-directional calculation engine in Cognos Planning lets you evaluate models and test assumptions in minutes to support truly informed business decisions. Cognos Planning eliminates unproductive spreadsheet activities like tracking down numbers, fixing broken links, and debugging macros. Instead, Cognos Planning offers sophisticated features like break-back, multidimensional slicing-and-dicing, and drill-down to help you explore data fully and efficiently. Cognos Planning enables real-time information flows for flexible rolling forecasts and greater visibility into future operating performance.

• Break-back. This unique capability automatically spreads high-level, top-down targets across any profile—like previous-period actuals or projected seasonality—across multiple dimensions such as products, customers, territories, or time periods without needing to define special business rules.
• Multi-dimensional analysis. Cognos Planning makes it easy to compare and manipulate data across myriad dimensions, perspectives, or versions. For example, you can compare targets among teams and individuals with current and historical actuals and with external benchmarks to quickly establish their viability and consistency.
• Unified view. Cognos Planning provides a unified view of your plan with key metrics and essential underlying information. With "one version of the truth," you can spend your time making business decisions, rather than debating data definitions and accuracy.

HIGH-PARTICIPATION ACROSS THE ENTERPRISE (Contributor)
A More Intelligent Way To Collect Information
At last organisations can easily engage everyone in the planning process (which may be thousands of contributors), collecting data from managers and staff across divisions and across geographies with Cognos Planning. Users work simultaneously, yet retain rapid server response, because Cognos Planning is optimised for end-user performance. The client requests data from the server only as needed and saves only data that has changed. Complex calculations are performed at the client, giving users instantaneous response and sparing the server unnecessary traffic during periods of high-use.
For added flexibility, Cognos Planning offers an Add-in For Excel, a familiar, convenient alternative to its well known browser interface. The browser offers line managers and staff simple, controlled yet intuitive participation in planning, budgeting, and forecasting with minimal disruption, enabling them to focus on what they do best— running their area of the business. Indeed, the Add-in for Excel offers personnel with more sophisticated needs the flexibility to effortlessly integrate greatly detailed personal or "shadow" systems with enterprise plans, budgets, and forecasts.
To use Cognos Planning, end-users simply launch Excel or a browser for immediate access to a complete, secure set of linked, role and user-specific planning templates. Users can quickly tab through them, enter data where required, and evaluate calculated results and review summaries prior to submission.

• Bridge the finance - to business language gap. Cognos Planning users enter operational data—either numerical or text values—in "their own business language," rather than unfamiliar financial terms. A user might enter the number of units sold, purchased, or needed. Information is translated by predefined formulas into financial data such as gross revenue, net income, or earnings per share. The result is more accurate information.
• Personalized, flexible data-entry. Cognos Planning templates are both easy to deploy and easy to use. Users only enter data that is relevant to their functional areas. Templates are easily customized by reorienting columns and rows and displaying or hiding empty or zero-filled fields.
• Minimal training. Because Cognos Planning is intuitive and offers either a Web- or Excel-based interface, little or no training is required to take advantage of its robust functionality.

STREAMLINED WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT (Contributor)
After entering required information, Cognos Planning users either save their work to return to later or submit it for review by another. At any point, designated reviewers can quickly monitor workflow status - not started, in progress, or ready for review - with intuitive, colour-coded icons. Reviewers can send e-mail to groups based on hierarchy or workflow status, enabling quick, easy communication. After work is submitted, a customisable interface displays the details of individual submissions, an overview of all submissions, or a combination of both. Aggregate totals are shown to help pinpoint areas that need revision. Reviewers can request modifications; and if last-minute revisions are needed, totals may be adjusted without compromising accuracy.

• Real-time aggregation. Cognos Planning instantly aggregates updates to plans and results, and lets you see the impact of new forecasts and plan contributions in real time, with no overnight batch processing and no user lock-outs.
• Easily track participation. Cognos Planning automatically monitors the entire planning process and gives you the status of every participant, so your planning cycle proceeds at the speed of the fastest plan contributor, not the slowest. It also promotes helpful dialogue among participants, streamlining cycles even further.
• Mobile Planning. Cognos Planning lets you plan where and when you want to, without a network connection. It knows when users check out plans to work offline and automatically synchronizes plans and forecasts when users check back in.

DISTRIBUTED ADMINISTRATION EMPOWERS THE ENTIRE ENTERPRISE (Contributor)

Localised Planning Ownership
Cognos Planning puts capability and control in the hands of financial or operational plan administrators who support an enterprise-wide planning process. A major component in planning and forecasting is speed. The ability to turn around a plan cycle—from the executive, to the front line planner, and back to the executive—is critical in maintaining accuracy and accountability. So why build into the planning process a 24-hour turnaround of key activities like adding users, moving data, or creating reports? If you operate in a global environment, why should Tokyo have to wait for New York to kick off a process? Distributed administration and localized ownership of the planning process eliminate material delay. Of course, the overall plan administrator still retains control.

• Online Administration. Cognos Planning lets you change data structures, user access rights, model parameters, and much more—without taking the system offline. You have the 24x7 availability that is a “non-negotiable” for global enterprises.
• Distributed Administration. Cognos Planning empowers multiple administrators across the organisation or across the globe to control their part of the plan to ensure timely and accurate plan creation. No 24-hour turnaround for basic processing requirements.
• Right-sized Planning. Cognos Planning allows models to be large or small, linked or stand-alone. Size and scale are determined by the planner, not the technology. The ability to link and convert operational plans to financial plans is built in.

FLEXIBLE CROSS-ENTERPRISE SECURITY (Contributor)
Cognos Planning manages security with complete flexibility. Advanced pre-defined selection options ensure that users see only those templates, or portions of templates, that they require. Viewing options can be set for entire business units, workgroups, even individuals. Detailed instructions, including customised headlines and drop-down boxes with optional Web-page links, can be tailored for each template, so that relevant information and expectations are always communicated to the person who needs them.

Single sign-on user authentication allows administrators to control and share security across all Cognos solutions with a single set of common users, user class definitions, and appropriate control of single-user ability to view and modify data. A single log-on can enable user access to all applications. Access to planning information is integrated with the Cognos security model—providing optimal data access to valid users.

PLAN TO PERFORM (Analyst and Contributor)
Because Cognos Planning enhances and extends the strategic value of current investments in ERP and operational systems from SAP, Oracle, or Siebel, companies can optimise existing investment while enjoying all the benefits of a proven planning solution; high frequency, high participation, automated workflow and approval, maximum control, and a single, up-to-the-minute view of the enterprise. Cognos Planning delivers both broad functionality and ease of use.

• Enterprise Management and Control: Cognos Planning brings process and data integrity to critical, but often cumbersome, business processes. It enables highly scalable and flexible planning, including managed workflow and collaboration, data management, version control, and modelling flexibility to support a wide range of integrated enterprise planning applications.
• Broad Planning Functionality: Users can perform “what-if” analyses by directly entering commands into cells, rows, and columns. Additional planning capabilities—such as annotations and Cognos Planning’s unique break-back, which enable users to easily perform top-down planning— extend its flexibility and broad range of native features and functions.
• Linking Personal Spreadsheets with Enterprise Plans: Cognos Planning lets spreadsheet users link personal models and desktop detail directly to the enterprise plan. The plan is synchronized as spreadsheet information changes, linking sophisticated models, reducing risk, and easing migration to an enterprise-wide standard for planning and forecasting.
• Full Scorecard and Report Integration: Cognos Planning is tightly integrated with Cognos business intelligence solutions like Cognos ReportNet, Cognos PowerPlay, and Cognos Metrics Manager. Users can perform instant analysis against plan in real time, leveraging market-leading solutions for production and management reporting, analysis, scorecarding, event detection, and notification.

COGNOS PLANNING TECHNICAL REQUIREMENTS

Client Workstation

• Microsoft Windows XP, 2000 SP4
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 SP2+ or later
  Minimum 256 MB RAM
• Microsoft Excel 2000 or later (optional)

Network Server

• Dual-processor Pentium III 1.0 GHz or faster
• Microsoft Windows 2000 Server or Advanced Server (SP 1 or newer), 2003 Server, XP Server
• IIS 5.0 or 6.0
• 1–2 GB free disk space
• Recommended 2 GB RAM