Financial performance management (FPM) has emerged as an all-important subset of the broader performance management market. Ventana Research describes FPM as a set of capabilities that define company's key performance indicators; formulate strategic plans and forecasts; and handles performance reporting.
According to the research group the above all optimise the office of finance's work, leading to operational efficiency and company-wide execution.
Says David McWilliam, Managing Director at Cognos, an IBM company, "However, FPM also forms part of the office of finance's traditional financial processes needed to run the business. Thus, FPM encompasses both the expanded capabilities - as outlined above - and the more traditional duties of finance."
And now taking the capabilities and intelligence of FPM even one step further is the Cognos' incorporation of a powerful analytics backbone. By analysing and optimising processes, the office of finance can help business managers drive profitability and growth initiatives.
However, in order to achieve this, finance needs a combination of data scalability, ease of use, real-time responsiveness, and interactivity.
To address the above, Cognos, has incorporated TM1 - a powerful software suite that provides scenario modelling against large data sets while making data and business structure changes in real-time.
TMI is built on 64-bit, in-memory OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) server that provides a real-time approach to consolidating, viewing, and editing enormous volumes of multidimensional data.
Indeed, TM1 adds analysis and business optimisation capabilities across Cognos' solution-set offering the following important value propositions:
Real-time performance;
Scalability for large data volumes;
Non-technical user-centric design
An Excel-based approach to application development
Deployable in a stand-alone configuration or integrated with dedicated Cognos planning, consolidation, analysis and reporting products.
Furthermore, analyst Butler Group states in its recent "Technology Audit" that "strong OLAP capabilities and the speed of the TM1 engine underpin the inherent strength of this technology". Butler also comments that as a result of the software's ability to execute calculations in real-time, dynamic analysis is possible. Furthermore, says the group, tight integration to Excel enables users to work without stepping outside of traditional comfort zones.
With TM1, Cognos is evolving FPM into a solution that provides a structured and automated approach to key financial processes from planning, budgeting, and forecasting to consolidation, reporting, and analytics.
In a nutshell, Cognos' TM1 offers the following capabilities to the office of finance:
Optimising planning and budgeting, the software provides the ability to read/write in real-time;
What-if scenario modelling for forecasting purposes; In-memory multi-dimensional cubes applied to analysis and reporting;
Centrally-managed business hierarchies, rules and calculations;
Built-in data and metadata integration;
and Leverages Excel functionality and skills.
Looking at Cognos' current TM1 solutions-set; the company offers the following products:
IBM Cognos TM1 Personal Edition - personal modeling and what-if analysis
IBM Cognos TM1 MidMarket Edition - optimised for SMEs for departmental or pilot applications; and
IBM Cognos TM1 Enterprise Edition which is integrated with Cognos 8 Platform
Unlimited scalability.
With Cognos TMI, the office of finance can make sense of the enormous amounts of data residing within their organisation, using it to steer the company to competitiveness, business agility and, ultimately, profitability.
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