IBM Business Analytics

Overview

Planning, Budgeting, Forecasting, Analysis and Scorecarding for Financial Performance Management

IBM Planning Analytics is an enterprise planning software platform that can transform your entire planning cycle, from target setting and budgeting to reporting, scorecarding, analysis and forecasting. Available as an on-premise or on-cloud solution, and with extensive mobile capabilities, Planning Analytics enables you to collaborate on plans, budgets and forecasts. You can analyse data, and create models – including profitability models – to reflect a constantly evolving business environment. In addition, integrated scorecards and strategy management capabilities help you monitor performance metrics and align resources and initiatives with corporate objectives and market events.

Powerful planning and analysis – Create and analyse sophisticated plans, budgets and forecasts, even those based on large data sets.

Integrated scorecards and strategy management – Model metrics to measure progress toward objectives and link them dynamically to actions and forecasts.

Flexible modeling – Develop and deploy even the most complex planning and analysis models using a guided modeling environment.

Engagement with more users – Engage users from across the organisation in high-participation planning and collaborate with remote and distributed users through a range of mobile devices, including the Apple iPad.

Cloud-based deployment option – Provide all the functionality of the on-premise solution with optional cloud-based deployment.

Planning Analytics Features

For the best business outcomes, your company needs to plan, forecast and budget effectively. You must also get the right information to the right people in the form they need it—and be able to make changes quickly.

IBM Planning Analytics provides a complete planning, budgeting and forecasting environment that supports the full range of business requirements.

With high-performance, on-demand financial analytics, flexible modeling and enterprise contribution for a broad range of users, Planning Analytics helps you develop timely, reliable forecasts, budgets and plans, reducing planning cycles by as much as 75%.

Planning Analytics can ramp up your planning, budgeting and analysis with:

  • exceptionally fast performance for large, sophisticated models and large data sets
  • a flexible modeling environment that requires no programming or traditional IT skills
  • the scalability and flexibility to start with a single planning application and then expand it for use in your entire enterprise
  • a choice of interfaces: Planning Analytics for Excel, and Planning Analytics Workspace
  • role-based security that supports multiple users and ensures that users see only those portions of the plan that they need to

In addition, Planning Analytics blends the workflow activities of planning with advanced personalised analysis, adapted to each contributor’s particular plans. While you’re planning, you’re not just viewing plans, but you’re dynamically building your own alternatives, sharing them with your team and using the best scenarios to make informed decisions. IBM Planning Analytics can be partnered with IBM Cognos Analytics, meaning you can link your plans and forecasts with reporting and scorecarding for a complete picture from goal setting to measuring progress. Powerful planning and analysis

  • Support driver-based plans and rolling forecasts; link plans together for a cohesive view of all functions, departments and geographies.
  • Perform complex cost allocations and profitability analysis to identify the most profitable products, customers, markets and sales channels.
  • Execute planning tasks through a personal workspace, connected to the broader enterprise – aggregated results are available to higher levels instantly.
  • Dramatically improve query execution times with multi-threaded queries that calculate multiple streams of results in parallel.
  • Analyze large, frequently changing data sets organized into complex models using a multidimensional, 64-bit, in-memory OLAP engine.

Integrated scorecards and strategy management

  • Add metrics and scorecards to every contributor’s workspace.
  • Model and measure key performance indicators (KPIs) in the same environment used for planning, budgeting and forecasting.
  • Ensure that strategic plans and measurement systems align capital with business opportunities.
  • Create highly visual scorecards that include interactive impact diagrams, Balanced Scorecards and custom diagrams.

Flexible modeling

  • Adopt model design and data access to fit your specific business processes; format input templates for flexibility and ease of use.
  • Create personalized scenarios to explore an unlimited number of alternatives so individuals, teams and departments can respond quickly to changing business conditions.
  • Easily monitor performance metrics for one or more planning servers from a single control panel.

Engagement with more users

  • Engage remote and distributed users through a range of mobile devices, including the Apple iPad.
  • Contribute to plans from any location. Users can review the status of plans and enter and submit plan values; managers can review, approve or reject contributions remotely.
  • Choose the interface best suited to your users: Planning Analytics for Excel, Planning Analytics Workspace or legacy TM1 Web,
  • Scale to thousands of participants to support top-down and bottom-up planning budgeting, and forecasting.

Cloud-based deployment option

  • Choose from on-premise or on-cloud deployment as the best delivery mechanism for your unique corporate environment—without sacrificing capabilities or limiting future deployment options.
  • Choose from centralized or distributed planning deployments to support a wide range of users, locations, environments and work profiles, including offline use.

Allow contribution by remote users and integration with on-premise data sources.

So where do you start?

The Cortell Team will work with you to identify your organisation’s biggest and highest priority challenges to kick off the initiative, to decide where Advanced Budgeting, Planning & Forecasting will have the greatest impact. We look at your biggest problems, such as the daily battle with the data required, collation, calculation, analysis and management of data, to support your specific business function and corporation decision making processes.

The current state is usually a labour intensive process that is:

  • prone to errors
  • an operational risk due to single person dependencies
  • costly due to over complicated excel spreadsheet reliance and,
  • isolated from other core business processes.

This is a great place to start. Typically, we commence an initiative by conducting a Proof of Concept with your business stakeholders to showcase how we can remove these issues.

As your Planning Analytics investment continues to grow within your organisation, the Cortell team can then help you build a centralised Financial Performance Management unit (Centre of Excellence), making it possible to share resources efficiently and effectively.

Why start with Cortell?

Cortell Australia is a certified and award winning IBM Planning Analytics Partner and Reseller.

Our consultants have delivered in excess of 1000 different Planning Analytics business models to over 500 customers.

Cortell have extensive budget, forecast and planning, cost management and activity based costing skills that have been applied to all industry sectors.