Cognos(R) (NASDAQ: COGN) (TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today announced the availability of a new performance management solution designed to help model, evaluate, select, and monitor business strategies for driving profitable growth.
BURLINGTON, Mass. (Business Wire EON) December 11, 2007 --
Cognos® (NASDAQ: COGN) (TSX: CSN), the world
leader in business intelligence and performance
management solutions, today announced the availability of a new
performance management solution designed to help model, evaluate,
select, and monitor business strategies for driving profitable growth.
The Cognos Strategic Finance Performance Blueprint provides a complete
performance management framework for strategic financial planning that
supports a Web-based process for the systematic evaluation of long-range
plans and strategies, analysis of various scenarios, supporting
decision-making and monitoring success. As the starting and ending point
for long-term planning across the enterprise, strategic financial
planning helps companies establish performance targets and resource
allocation guidance for developing operational plans and budgets.
Strategic planners rationalize key objectives, weigh investment
alternatives, and translate higher-order goals into discrete financial
targets, resource plans and performance metrics for the rest of the
organization.
While strategic financial planning is typically performed by a small
group, its outcome has major significance for the entire organization
and its stakeholders. The Strategic Finance Performance Blueprint was a
critical factor when UNITE Group PLC, the leading student accommodation
company in the United Kingdom, sought to implement a planning solution
for strategic decision making requirements that would impact a business
serving more than 38,000 university students. The company’s
planning initiative required the implementation of a comprehensive and
connected strategic finance process.
“We selected Cognos Planning and the Cognos’
Strategic Finance Blueprint as our planning solution for several reasons
- namely, the robust and seamless connection between operational plans
and budgets and strategic finance models and the pre-built analytical
capability. The fact that Cognos involved leading experts and clients
from around the world in collaborating on it was evident in how well it
met our needs,” said Zoe Fitzsimmons, MI
Design Manager at UNITE. “Having gone through
a comprehensive comparison exercise during the vendor selection, there
did not appear to be a competing product that could provide us with
similar capability or greater confidence. The Strategic Finance
Blueprint was fundamental to UNITE’s software
purchasing decision because it enables the type of investment decision
modeling that is core to the company’s future
business model.”
Strategic financial planning is an iterative process that unites
top-down target setting, long-term goals and bottom-up plans and
forecasts based on the latest information over shorter horizons. The
workflows and analytics support identification of gaps between
performance aspirations and emerging reality so initiatives can help
management course-correct. Optimal results are achieved when a uniform
planning platform is in place.
According to research by The Hackett Group, world-class finance
organizations are 88% more likely than their peers to have an integrated
tool to support the strategic planning, tactical planning and budgeting
processes. This integrated process and technology environment enables
world-class finance organizations to support a planning process that is
more accurate and costs 34% less than that of peer group companies.
Ultimately, this results in an industry-relative equity market return
that is 2.4 times larger than the industry norm.
Most companies, however, see results that are anything but optimal,
since their strategic financial planning processes are often plagued by
limited information access, lack of version control, long cycle times,
and lack of confidence in model accuracy. The Cognos Strategic Finance
Blueprint based on Cognos 8 Planning, eliminates these roadblocks by
facilitating information access, easing version control, ensuring
calculation reliability and integrity, and increasing confidence in the
quality of the management information base.
“The Strategic Finance Performance Blueprint
provides a reliable approach to enterprise-wide, strategic financial
planning and is an ideal replacement for spreadsheet-based approaches to
long-term enterprise financial planning,”
said Doug Barton, vice-president of product marketing, performance
management, Cognos. “Integrated seamlessly
with the Cognos Performance Management System, the blueprint is fully
flexible and scalable across any organization using Cognos 8 Planning,
and enables executives and decision makers to evaluate their success in
meeting goals when connected with operational plans, budgets, and
forecasts in a single reliable, planning framework.”
In addition, the Strategic Finance Performance Blueprint:
-
Facilitates long-range strategic planning (e.g., over a ten-year
horizon)
-
Evaluates the impact of multiple strategies
-
Allows for comparison and analysis of what-if growth scenarios
-
Facilitates evaluating internal or external growth opportunities
-
Enables mergers & acquisition (M&A) planning.
-
Provides an assessment of the current portfolio –
allowing for analysis and impact of divestitures
-
Includes tax, funding, and credit rating impacts
-
Includes a full set of consolidated financial statements with distinct
views for base growth, acquisitions, and divestitures
The Strategic Finance Performance Blueprint is available immediately to
customers. More information can be found at www.cognos.com/innovationcenter/blueprint_enterprise_planning.html.
About Cognos Performance Blueprints:
Cognos offers a full suite of Performance Blueprints to address planning
and performance management process areas that directly impact an
organization's ability to create business value. Both functional and
industry-specific process areas can now be automated, streamlined and
transformed to help organizations quickly create more business value.
Developed by the Cognos
Innovation Center for Performance Management, the Cognos Performance
Blueprints are a key component within the Cognos Performance Management
System, which combines technology, best practices, analytical
applications and solutions, and a broad network of partners into a
single performance management solution. For further information on the
Cognos Performance Blueprints see http://www.cognos.com/innovationcenter/blueprint.html.
About Cognos:
Cognos, the world leader in business
intelligence and performance
management solutions, provides world-class enterprise planning and
BI software and services to help companies plan, understand and manage
financial and operational performance.
Cognos brings together technology, analytical applications, best
practices, and a broad network of partners to give customers a complete
performance system. The Cognos performance system is an open and
adaptive solution that leverages an organization’s
ERP, packaged applications, and database investments. It gives customers
the ability to answer the questions -- How are we doing? Why are we on
or off track? What should we do about it? –
and enables them to understand and monitor current performance while
planning future business strategies.
Cognos serves more than 23,000 customers in more than 135 countries, and
its top 100 enterprise customers consistently outperform market indexes.
Cognos performance management solutions and services are also available
from more than 3,000 worldwide partners and resellers. For
more information, visit the Cognos Web site at http://www.cognos.com.
Cognos and the Cognos logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of
Cognos Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. All
other names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective
companies.
Note to Editors: Copies of previous Cognos press releases and Corporate
and product information are available on Cognos' Web site at http://www.cognos.com
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