Financial Performance Management
Business evolves every day. To follow it up, managers have to work through plans, forecasts, analysis. Every part of their activity states different challenges. IBM Cognos Financial Performance Management has been designed to facilitate their work.
Generally, the whole performance management might be summarized to answering three important questions - how is a company doing (whether it is on or off track), why is that (analysis-making for finding out the reasons of situation), and how to change it in the future?
These questions are basic for all the departments across an enterprise. The managership structure looks usually similarly:
Every finance function is somehow pressured simultaneously from two different sides. At first, manager has to fulfill new compliance demands. At second, he is also forced to outperform the expectations of an investor. To this end, formerly, spreadsheets were commonly used. Recently, the capabilities offered by spreadsheets are much too restrained to fulfill growing requirements of analytic process and sharing its results. Furthermore, finance systems used are widely diversified, therefore communication between them is highly complicated. That creates another troubles with data sharing what lengthens the time necessary for decision preparing. It effects in growing business risks, which minimizing is a serious test for financial systems, due to unreliability of plans and forecasts, analysis weakness, and long time of reacting for market changes. From that, derives a need of finding another, better working system.
Present-day management demands creating actual and reliable analysis of actual conditions and present performance. Every time processing takes too much time and effort to be efficient enough. Also, its accuracy and trustworthiness is low, due to susceptibility to errors. Creating a comprehensive view of multiple ledgers is difficult for many companies. Adjustments and modifications are time-consuming and do not guarantee the final success. As long as spreadsheets remain the dominant interface of that systems, new financial reporting requirements cannot be fully satisfied - purpose-built capabilities are too strongly limited. Processes that accompany managing, usually demand much more time than analyzing itself. That effects in growing costs of ensuring regulatory compliance and enough data quality and timeliness.
A quick look forward of the business doesn't announce significant changes. Present and future business concentrates on mostly the same challenges. Time- and labor-consuming budgeting and preparing forecasts are a common gripe. The same is with disconnected plans for revenue expense and capital expenditures. Moreover, rollups are error-prone, forecasts infrequent and not reliable. In a word, that can't keep up with business conditions changes. Thereby, adapting operational tactics to organization's targets is extremely complicated.
IBM Cognos FPM
Solutions offered by IBM enable control over the performance driving process as plans and forecasts are connected with corporate profit and loss. Depending on needs, forecasts are being refreshed once a month, quarter or - if a customer prefers - event-driven. Both, top-down targets and bottoms-up plans are aligned, what ensures full financial plans synchronization with presumed goals, strategies and tasks. That effects in reliable, confident, and always on time decision making.
Despite all of that, forecasting, planning, and budgeting are only a part of performance management systems. They must be followed by different transactions reports, data warehouses, and another legacy systems.
Nowadays, majority of organizations depends on some operational, critical data, its compatibility and timeliness. Unfortunately, all of that lack - data is stored in different environments served by different applications, what almost disables the possibility of checking the whole. It leads to a significant reduction of visibility. Therefore, companies have to engage independent specialists - analytics to create objective analysis and reporting. Pointless to remind how much money and effort it demands. A solution able to put all of that in order is a necessity.
This is a role for IBM Cognos - solutions letting companies provide a full, clear and - what's so important, but rarely achieved - consistent overview of actual company performance. Easy and rapid connection to data sources is a key to success. With Cognos solutions, managers get a better chance to make more efficient and profitable decisions. IBM designed a tool able to address all the financial performance management challenges with simultaneous reduction of maintenance costs.
IBM glories in the titles of Gartner Magic Quadrant leader followed by thousands of companies that IBM is a partner to. Years of experience, which Cognos is based on, ensure that this is a great replacement for formerly used performance management systems, which modernization is indispensable, due to a growing importance of function played by financial services. IBM Cognos Financial Performance Management solutions contribute to the progressive changes.