Nota de prensa en inglés de Cognos USA.
BURLINGTON, MA, February 10, 2004Cognos, the world leader in business intelligence (BI) and corporate performance management, today announced it has extended its industry-leading enterprise planning solution with the launch of Cognos Enterprise Planning Series Version 7.2. This release expands Cognos’ leadership in enterprise planning with a broad range of customer-driven functionality, flexibility, and technical enhancements. Cognos has also strengthened its CPM solution by further enhancing the interoperability of enterprise planning with Cognos Enterprise Business Intelligence Series, including Cognos ReportNet and Cognos Metrics Manager.
In the face of changing markets, increased regulatory pressures, and a desire to optimize operations, the most successful companies are taking an integrated, broad-based approach to managing performance. Cognos Enterprise Planning Series Version 7.2 ensures the integrity, timeliness, and relevance of forecasts, plans, and reports – giving financial executives the means to improve performance and enable CPM integration across the company by incorporating financial and operational planning processes with BI and scorecarding.
Integrated with all Cognos products, Cognos Enterprise Planning Version 7.2 offers real time reporting, calculation of and visibility to drivers and metrics, and integration with other related management consolidation processes. It extends core planning and continues to enhance enterprise planning values that drive high participation planning, monitoring, and reporting on performance across the enterprise.
Designed to solve spreadsheet budgeting pains more effectively through high-productivity data entry, process integrity and data security, Cognos Enterprise Planning Series Version 7.2 enables organizations to evolve from static, finance-centric budgeting to dynamic, business manager-engaged, enterprise planning. The vision of enterprise planning goes beyond spreadsheets to fulfill the requirement for delivering plans based on business drivers that can rapidly and reliably shape an up-to-the minute view of business performance. This enables users to bring together diverse and complex planning requirements across an organization’s processes and activities into a single, unified plan.
Cited by analysts and customers as reinforcement of Cognos’ industry leadership in enterprise planning
A long-time Cognos customer, Discovery Networks Europe historically used spreadsheets for its planning, budgeting, and forecasting prior to selecting Cognos Enterprise Planning Series. Rapid business growth rendered this process impractical, and Discovery selected a more automated, integrated and reliable solution. Discovery currently uses this to create, compare, and evaluate business scenarios and assumptions. Users access current data to assess performance, and proceed from «what is» to the «what if» scenarios critical for future success of the growing business. Discovery worked with Cognos in influencing Cognos Enterprise Planning Series Version 7.2, testing it within the Discovery environment.
«With Cognos Enterprise Planning Series Version 7.2, Cognos has strengthened its best-in-class enterprise planning solution to solve more business challenges using Cognos’ full corporate performance management suite,» said Paul Scarlett, Business Planning Analyst, Discovery Networks Europe. «The enhanced solution will allow us to leverage our major deployment in other Cognos solutions, enabling the delivery of performance planning tightly coupled with reporting. It will also allow us the opportunity to drive our planning process with greater speed and ease.»
«Enterprise planning is a strategic core for performance management in any global organization that is looking to decentralize planning and budgeting while maintaining centralized control and consistency,» said John Van Decker, Vice President, META Group. «Firms will need planning tools that are integrated with other business intelligence components – such as scorecards and management reporting – and financial consolidations to ensure uniformity in reporting and one version of the truth.»
Murray, Inc. has been a fixture of the U.S. consumer goods sector for over a century, as an industry-leading manufacturer of lawn tractors, walk-behind mowers, and recreational vehicles. With Cognos, Murray is streamlining complex budgeting, forecasting and consolidation processes, including further reducing monthly close times.
«Cognos continues to make significant enhancements to its industry-leading enterprise planning solution and we are very impressed by the new functionality of Cognos Enterprise Planning Series Version 7.2. Currently with Cognos we can create accurate, timely financial reports and deliver financial performance information into the hands of our decision-makers, enabling them to better manage and forecast corporate performance,» said Rose Melillo, financial systems manager, Murray Inc. «With the new functionalities in Cognos Enterprise Planning Series Version 7.2, we look forward to real-time enterprise reporting through live access to planning data, with the ability to report directly against Cognos Analyst and Cognos Contributor combined with other financial and operational data. With one version of the truth, we can then spend our time making decisions, rather than debating data definitions and accuracy.»
Solution resolves the recurring pains associated with the ‘million-spreadsheet’ march and takes finance beyond budgeting
Tested by a wide range of global organizations, such as Deloitte, Deltek, and Discovery Networks Europe, Cognos Enterprise Planning Series Version 7.2 delivers new functionalities, such as:
Real time reporting: Cognos delivers the world’s leading BI solution to the office of finance through unprecedented integration with enterprise planning – further enabling the enterprise to move beyond periodic budgeting and reporting cycles to real-time visibility of operating performance. Participants in the planning process can see planning information in real time and can access industry-leading analysis and reporting capabilities instantly.
Active Planning: Cognos Enterprise Planning Series Version 7.2 continues to lower the hurdles to efficient and effective business manager participation, delivering enhanced business insight. New quick commands easily translate typical planning data changes – such as increasing sales by 10%, decreasing a value by 2% – into easy-to-use commands direct entry commands. And all of the data changes are auditable, allowing users and reviewers to understand the business thoughts in arriving at a final plan.
Enhanced Consolidation and Financial Reporting: Cognos continues to drive innovation in our Consolidation and Financial Reporting capabilities. Version 7.2 brings a host of new enhancements including attribute-based models to facilitate complex dimensional consolidation and reporting needs and deeper integration with Excel. Enhancements that help facilitate the management close and reporting process.
Closed-loop CPM: In core financial functions, financial reporting, consolidation, and planning models are integrated to provide reuse and standardization of key financial information. In addition, Cognos Enterprise Planning Series Version 7.2 features integration with Cognos Metrics Manager to manage and update plan metrics and integration with Cognos Enterprise BI Series to prepare data for next generation reporting and analysis. This delivers a strong solution that crosses all processes and requirements of the office of finance.
Enterprise Security and Application Access: Single sign-on user authentication allows administrators to control security across all Cognos products. This means shared security across Cognos products with a single collection of common user and user class definitions. Users only need to logon once to access applications.
«Through this extended offering, Cognos truly owns a different, more capable, and more valuable platform for modernizing the planning and performance management practices of today’s companies,» said Doug Barton, vice president, Enterprise Planning Product Marketing, Cognos. «Our enterprise planning solution resolves the recurring pains associated with the ‘million-spreadsheet’ march and takes customers well beyond the limited visibility and predictability that traditional budgeting, consolidation, and reporting process and tools have provided. And through tighter integration with the full Cognos suite, we offer complete CPM capability by giving users the ability to plan, monitor, and report on performance across the enterprise.»