IBM Software Data Sheet

Business Analytics software

IBM Cognos TM1

Enterprise planning, budgeting and analysis
Highlights

In todays challenging economy, the answers to three rudimentary performance questions are more important than ever:

Reduces planning cycles by as much as 75% and reporting from days to minutes Owned and managed by Finance and lines of business Provides exceptionally fast performance for large, sophisticated models and data sets Features personalized planning and analysiswithin a managed planning process Aligns financial and operational targets in one connected, dynamic solution

How are we doing? Why are we on or off track? What should we do to address performance gaps quickly?

To answer these questions and to anticipate the best course of action for better 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 itand be able to make changes quickly. This coordinated approach requires a highly flexible enterprise planning solution that aligns financial and operational targets in one connected, dynamic solution. IBM Cognos TM1 provides a complete planning, budgeting and analysis environment for critical company-wide performance management activities driven by Finance. Cognos TM1 supports a full range of business requirements: from high-performance, financial analytics and flexible modeling to enterprise contribution for a broad range of usersfrom manufacturing, sales and service to human resources and marketing. Cognos TM1 addresses all of these interrelated needs with:

On-demand analysis Data and user scalability Data integrity A multi-dimensional database and data tools Automated workflow A choice of interfaces: Microsoft Excel, web and a contribution interface for managed participation

Your financial executives, planners, controllers and line of business managers can change input values and recalculate them in on demand. With a consolidated view of plans, they can reset details to attack business problems immediately, rather than wait hours to make changes.

Business Analytics Data Sheet

Business Analytics software

Features and benefits of Cognos TM1

Analyze IBM Cognos 10: Intelligence Unleashed Smarter Decisions. Better Results

Cognos 10 delivers a revolutionary new user experience and expands traditional business intelligence (BI) with planning, scenario modeling, real-time monitoring and predictive analytics. With the ability to interact, search and assemble all perspectives of your business, Cognos 10 provides a limitless BI workspace to support how people think and work. Cognos 10 enables organizations to outperform by providing:

With the deep analytics capabilities of Cognos TM1, you can validate your planning assumptions and meet the dynamic needs of your organization with a fact-based approach to the planning process. You can create any number of personalized scenarios in Excel, the Web or the Contributor interfaceand send them out to individuals or teams for their responses. With one more key stroke, you commit your preferred scenario to the business plan. Thanks to the high-performance OLAP engine at the core of Cognos TM1, you can analyze frequently-changing data for millions of items, such as SKUs or transactions. For example, you can:

Analytics that everyone can use in a BI workspace that sharpens individual skills to answer key business questions Collective intelligence with built-in collaboration and social networking to connect people and insights to gain alignment Actionable insight everywhere in mobile, real-time and business processes to instantly respond at the point of impact

Review sales daily, or even hourly, by store, brand or representative. Analyze day-by-day profitability, customer churn for thousands or millions of customer accounts. Track trends in spending over weeks or months.

Built on a proven technology platform, Cognos 10 is designed to upgrade seamlessly and to cost-effectively scale for the broadest of deployments. Cognos 10 provides you and your organization the freedom to see more, do moreand make the smart decisions that drive better business results.

The OLAP 64-bit technology of Cognos TM1 meets even the most complex, multi-dimensional analytics needs of large-scale operations, so you can query data whenever you need tono matter how vast the data set may be. In addition, you can view instant updates from streamed data and drill through to your transaction systems for added context and thus greater accuracy in decision making.

Advanced personalization with managed workflow

Cognos TM1 blends advanced personalized analysis, adapted to each contributors particular plans, with the workflow activities of planning. While youre planning, youre not just viewing plans, but youre dynamically building your own alternatives, sharing them with your team and using the best scenarios to make informed decisions. Available in all Cognos TM1 interfaces and IBM Cognos Business Intelligence dashboards, advanced personalization provides:

Personalization for hierarchies and dimensions Personalized scenarios with extremely fast what-if response times Planning without IT intervention but consistent with ITs data governance

For improved simulation in planning and forecasting, users can work privately to build any number of personal scenarios such as multiple travel budgets (best and worst case) for comparison. At any point, they can then share preferred scenarios with teams for review and rework as necessary.

Business Analytics Data Sheet

Business Analytics software

Model

Cognos TM1 adapts to your planning and forecasting processes and rapidly incorporates best practices such as driver-based planning and rolling forecasts. Owned by your finance organization and the lines of business, Cognos TM1 provides the self-sufficiency that enables financial and business analysts to build and maintain business models and rulesand define security to ensure data accuracy and integrity. Cognos TM1 provides a single high-performance modeling environment, where every component is integrated. All business rules, data and metadata are shared among all applications so your teams work with only one set of rules and data for linked models. With the addition of IBM Cognos Business Viewpoint, you can add centralized dimension management, which enables users to capture, maintain, govern and share multiple hierarchies, structures and definitions they can use for planning and forecasting. To help you rapidly access valuable information locked away in back-office applications, Cognos TM1 provides data connectors that are shared with IBM Cognos Business Intelligence to that streamline the loading of disparate data into your models. Users can also create their own processes to automate data importation, metadata management and other tasks.
Contribute

Another type of user personalization includes custom aggregations, the consolidation of selected elements in the TM1 contribution interface. Users can create these groupings on-the-fly, without relying on IT to make modifications.

Cognos TM1 is readily adaptable for high levels of participation. You deploy your planning activities in Microsoft Excel or a managed application in the contribution interface. These experiences enable advanced, on-demand analysis but require minimal training, no programming skills and minimal IT assistance.

Static, dynamic or conditional pick lists improve the flexibility of what-if scenarios

Enterprise Excel-based client

Cognos TM1 features an enterprise-ready, Excel-based client that provides all the capabilities of enterprise planning and analysis with the familiar Excel interface and personal scenarios, so you can engage hundreds of line of business and finance managers in the planning process. Users can configure their own planning and analysis solutions using guided applications, test assumptions and generate reports quickly and easily.
Managed contribution with TM1

Charting and the ability to change entries in the charts dynamically enable informed decisions.

With managed contribution, you can collect input from systems and staff from all divisions and locations consistently and automaticallyand in a form that can be audited. The managed contribution component of Cognos TM1 has an easy-to-use interface that can handle high numbers of participants and analytic processing. You can quickly assemble and deploy

Business Analytics Data Sheet

Business Analytics software

planning solutions for your enterprise while receiving an up-to-the-minute status of every participant in the planning process. The result? You can quickly surmise the maturity of the cycle and eliminate delays in adapting plans. This contribution interface supplies an intuitive and structured planning environment, where managed workflow is blended with analysis. Users not only contribute their own data into planning templates, but they can also create their own personalized hierarchies and dimensions. They can roll up data to suit their own business needs, such as adding a new department structure, modifying a product mix or removing a territory. Because they can create and test a variety of scenarios and write ad hoc changes back to data sources, your teams can realize immediate business impact with timely revisions to plans. In addition, performing on-the-fly scenarios such as these do not necessitate a drain on precious IT resources. For more finely-grained simulation, your planners can use advanced filtering features, such as hierarchy leveling, attribute values, element names (with aliases) and spelling patterns. As part of the flow of their planning and analysis activities, they can drill, sort, link and even chart data. Sophisticated features such as pick lists, undo/redo, multi-pane docking and color-coded data changes sharpen driver-based plans.

Cognos TM1 features

Enhance your Planning and Analytics and related reporting processes with:

Performance. Patented, 64-bit, in-memory OLAP for enterprise scalability and on-demand scenario modeling facilitates enterprise-wide planning and analysis. Security. Role-based security supports multiple users and user types. Advanced predefined selection options ensure that users see only those portions of the plan that they need to. Contribution interface. This client interface blends high-performance, personalized analytics with structured workflow for rapid user adoption and greater speed and accuracy in planning. Personalization. Personalized home pages, workflow and context-driven reports enhance your planning processes and require no IT intervention. Excel formatting on the Web. All planners and stakeholders can read, write, perform what-if analysis and report with Excel sheets right on the Web. Administrative tools. Administration is easy with utilities for managing server performance and role-based access. Global support. Full Unicode support accommodates expanded string lengths beyond 255 characters. Includes language support for Japanese and simplified Chinese. Link to external applications. Because Cognos TM1 is Cognos 10 ready, you can link to enterprise reporting, scorecarding and other desktop applications so users can work with familiar interfaces. Connectors. You can extend your ERP investments with the IBM Cognos data orchestration tool. This tool easily connects to data warehouses, Excel worksheets and to any ODBC-compliant databases.

Expanding planning and insight

Cognos TM1 is Cognos 10 ready and can be embedded in a Cognos dashboard to provide richer scenario analysis for decision makers.

With the administrator component, administrators can manage the deployment of planning solutions in a few simple steps because the TM1 centralized planning and analysis server is a natural extension of its modeling environment. After models have been defined with dimensions and rules, you assemble the views for users, set the approval hierarchy and rights for users and groups and make the planning application available to users with the client of choice.

The planning process is also scalable with Cognos TM1: Companies can start with a single planning application and then expand it for use in the entire enterprise. Combining a broad range of user experiences with on-demand analysis translates into a clearer more comprehensive view of your business, time-frame appropriate plans, high-participation and large data setsall for increased accuracy in resource allocation and business forecasting.

Business Analytics Data Sheet

Business Analytics software

Conclusion
Because Cognos TM1 is Cognos 10 ready, you are able to link your entire company strategy with your planning, analysis and forecasting as well as extend traditional ERP systems. The result is a consistent scorecarding, reporting and analysis environment the complete picture from goal setting and planning, to measuring progress and reporting. Without compromising high standards in IT for conformance, compliance and cost effective scalability, you can drive best-practice planning, performance management process excellence and, thus, better business optimization.

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About IBM Business Analytics

IBM Business Analytics software delivers complete, consistent and accurate information that decision-makers trust to improve business performance. A comprehensive portfolio of business intelligence, advanced analytics, financial performance and strategy management and analytic applications gives you clear, immediate and actionable insights into current performance and the ability to predict future outcomes

For more information

For further information or to reach a representative: ibm.com/cognos.

Request a call
To request a call or to ask a question, go to ibm.com/cognos/ contactus. An IBM Cognos representative will respond to your enquiry within two business days.

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