Cognos has developed a Microsoft Excel add-in for its Cognos Enterprise Planning solution, embracing Excel to provide users with a familiar work environment with added functionality.
By delivering plans using a browser and now Excel, the product provides complete enterprise management and control by leveraging easy to use, broadly deployed tools available to every user.
"Improving the effectiveness of planning and budgeting can have an immediate, positive impact on the performance of the entire organisation. What most companies view as a rote administrative function can and should be used as a core component of performance management," says Robert Kugel, CFA, VP and research director, financial performance management at Ventana Research.
"In companies that have adopted enterprise planning solutions, we see improved efficiency, and more importantly increased effectiveness. Cognos`s new Excel extensions will enable spreadsheet-oriented organisations that have been reluctant to adopt a dedicated enterprise planning application an easy transition. This is a major step towards sustainable performance management practices for improved profitability."
According to a Ventana Research report, the main obstacle to making planning and budgeting processes more effective is the spreadsheet-based system used by most organisations. The report adds that standalone spreadsheets are great for individual, ad hoc computation and analysis, but they are inherently flawed in executing collaborative, business-wide processes such as planning and budgeting. This is because they prevent finance organisations from intelligently applying the information collected, and make it too difficult to revise plans quickly in a coherent fashion when conditions change.
The new Excel interface delivers new functionality and enhancements, such as:
* Business-wide management and control with spreadsheets;
* Integrating Cognos Planning functionality within spreadsheets;
* Linking personal spreadsheets into Cognos Planning;
* Full scorecard and report integration; and
* Leveraging Cognos Enterprise Security with Excel.
"Today, spreadsheets are pervasive throughout the organisation because they require minimal training and users are simply comfortable with the environment," says Doug Barton, VP, Enterprise Planning product marketing at Cognos.
"Organisations are wrestling with the appropriate role of spreadsheets in the face of increasing scrutiny on financial and operational controls. With this new solution, Cognos is allowing our customers to keep their spreadsheets, while benefiting from all the power of enterprise planning to control a more effective, driver-based, high frequency, high participation process that delivers a single, up-to-the-minute view of the enterprise performance plan."
John van Decker, VP of META Group, says: "Although Excel offloads reliance on IT for reporting and analysis, it is often misused as a "system of record", and when it is used as a primary vehicle for financial systems such as reporting or planning, critical control required for Sarbanes-Oxley Act compliance is compromised. Leading BPM (business performance management) tools such as those from Cognos target initially the inclusion of Excel within the BPM environment and ultimately the replacement of disparate Excel-only-based processes that do not leverage common data, providing `one version of the truth`."
Share
Editorial contacts