Thus planning has become indispensable in this kind of a scenario where organizations routinely needs to measure their expectations against performance, understand the trends in business metrics, be in control of their business and model the future with what-if analysis.

But during the process of planning there may arise a number of road blocks right at the inception while building the plan or later while maintaining and managing it. Building the plan, which in itself is never the objective, not only diverts focus away from analysis of performance to the minute intricacies of designing the plan, it also sucks up too much time. Moreover, additional effort is spent in chasing people across the organization for inputs to the plan, and the struggling to create a structure in the face of gaps in information.

While managing and maintain the plan, on the other hand, other challenges crop up. Due to the complexity of spreadsheets, plans built using them turn out to be quite inflexible when the business environment changes, and consequent changes in the underlying assumptions in the plan become necessary. Not only does any change require a lot of manual intervention, version control of multiple editions of plans floating around becomes a big headache. Taken all together, these conspire to make a plan obsolete as soon as it is rolled out.

It is exactly to meet these challenges and leave the CFO free to focus on his goal of using the plan as a performance yardstick, Cognos FPM becomes useful. Cognos FPM solution

• Cognos FPM integrates with ERP and facilitates comparison between plan and actuals
• Cognos FPM complies with various reporting standards such as IFRS
• Cognos FPM makes it easy for business users to change and realign the plan flexibly as required by changing circumstances
• Cognos FPM allows Managers to focus on analysis rather than building the plan
• Cognos FPM saves time and reduces uncertainty and significantly improve the success of the plan.