STORAGE

Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence (BI) and corporate performance management (CPM), today announced it is extending its leading enterprise planning capabilities by delivering a series of targeted, pre-built capabilities, designed to help customers link operational and financial plans to improve forecast reliability. Developed by the Cognos Innovation Center for Performance Management, the new Cognos Plan-to Perform Blueprints are documented, pre-defined data, process and policy models available to customers at no additional cost. The Blueprint models are based on proven best-practices in enterprise planning and allows customer to jump-start their planning and forecasting deployments in areas such as strategic financial forecasting and target setting, headcount and compensation, sales and capital expenditures. "Modern organizations want to bridge the gap between operational and financial planning consistently across the organization to elevate their performance," said John Van Decker, senior vice-president, META Group. "Business performance management will achieve its greatest value by integrating disparate analytic processes. Tools that help companies optimize their business processes to achieve this goal quickly, will consequently help these companies to find new revenue opportunities, reduce operating expenses and make better use of working capital." The Blueprints define all the necessary technology and process design choices for customers to quickly deploy a business planning process across their organization. By linking these Blueprints, customers can: -- Establish a dynamic link that keeps plans, people, and activities in sync as business conditions change -- Improve their ability to align strategic objectives with operational plans, linked to external market events and operational drivers. -- Quickly see the impact of changes in operational plans on corporate financials. -- Intelligently and quickly improve resource allocations in support of corporate objectives. -- Consistently communicate and apply corporate guidelines and policies throughout the enterprise. "With these Blueprints, Cognos is helping bring more integrated, collaborative and dynamic planning processes closer to reality," said Philip Stack, Director, Resource Planning, University of Alberta. "We have been collaborating with Cognos and other higher education institutions on sharing best practices in enterprise planning; and we like what we see in these Blueprint models. We are anxious to explore the Blueprints and their capabilities. If we can reduce the time and effort required to deploy new best-practice planning capabilities, we will help keep our university more agile in responding to emerging strategic opportunities and organizational challenges." Five Cognos Enterprise Plan-to-Perform Blueprints will be available in January through the Cognos Innovation Center for Performance Management. These include Strategic Financial Planning and Forecasting, Sales Planning and Forecasting; Expense Planning and Control; Headcount and Compensation Planning; and Capital Expenditure Planning. "For most organizations the pace and variability of their business is accelerating. The Plan-to-Perform Blueprints will help customers effectively manage that challenge by enabling smooth synchronization of their financial and operational planning processes as they extend their planning initiatives beyond finance and across their enterprise," said Rich Lanahan, vice president, Cognos Innovation Center for Performance Management. "A key component of our company mandate is to help customers adopt and sustain innovative practices for improving performance across the organization. These Blueprints will help accelerate this process so customers can achieve a more rapid time-to-value with their implementations across business units and geographies."