Cognos, a business intelligence and performance management solutions vendor, has introduced two new offerings for organisations to facilitate process improvements in financial consolidation and corporate reporting.
Developed by the Cognos Innovation Centre for Performance Management, the new Management and Financial Reporting (MFR) and International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Performance Blueprints are based on the proven reporting and analysis capabilities of Cognos 8 Business Intelligence and the enterprise financial consolidation and corporate reporting capabilities of Cognos 8 Controller.
They join the new Cognos Close, Consolidate and Report (CCR) Performance Blueprint* in representing Cognos` first performance solutions for the area of financial management and control. Each solution embeds best practices culled from the Cognos Innovation Centre`s ongoing work with its industry thought leader advisors, partners and more than 500 customer members.
The new Management and Financial Reporting (MFR) Performance Blueprint provides a pre-built library of easy to configure performance reports to help simplify and accelerate deployment. It is designed to help increase efficiencies in the financial consolidation process and to provide timely distribution of performance reports to business managers, who are often underserved with business performance information critical for management decision-making.
The combination of Cognos` built-in global consolidation functionality and proven reporting and analysis capabilities with predefined reports based on industry best practices serves as a reporting foundation for operations and planning data. This foundation provides greater management visibility to performance information.
The new International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) Performance Blueprint addresses the move by the European Commission to establish common regulatory and accounting standards to ensure that company accounts across the European Union are more reliable, transparent and can be more easily compared. It assembles the collective best practice insights of Cognos customers across Europe to provide generic, predefined structures that comply with the IFRS regulation and cover the management of financial statements including income statements, balance sheets and statements of changes in equity, cash flow and explanatory notes.
The new MFR and IFRS Performance Blueprints help customers address the challenge of facilitating continuous performance improvement practices and efficiently meeting the demands of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance and International Financial Reporting Standards. This challenge is made more significant by increasingly complex business models, the fast pace of change, and mergers and acquisitions. The move to globalisation and harmonisation of standards also creates new statutory and regulatory requirements for financial management processes.
"The functionality present in the MFR Performance Blueprint facilitates the production of a `fit for purpose` suite of KPI reports more rapidly than previously possible, as the MFR Performance Blueprint contains pre-defined formatting that can be quickly adapted to meet specific reporting requirements, reducing reporting suite development time and maintenance," says Kevin Clifford, head of reporting and analysis, Thorn Group.
Says David McWilliam, managing director of Cognos SA: "These new offerings will help customers reduce implementation project time and accelerate their progress to business value. The end result is improved internal reporting cycles and a higher degree of transparency for performance management decision-making."
Performance Blueprints
Cognos offers a full suite of Performance Blueprints to address planning and performance management process areas that directly impact an organisation`s ability to create business value. Both functional and industry specific process areas can now be automated, streamlined and transformed to help organisations quickly create more business value. The Cognos Performance Blueprints are a key component within the Cognos Performance Management System, which combines technology, best practices, analytical applications and solutions, and a broad network of partners into a single performance management solution. For further information on the Cognos Performance Blueprints see: http://www.cognos.com/innovationcenter/blueprint.html
Cognos 8 Controller
Cognos 8 Controller offers strengthened financial management and control capabilities for enterprise financial consolidation and corporate reporting. Integration with Cognos 8 BI provides proven reporting, analysis, metrics and event management for distribution of certified financial metrics . For further information see: http://www.cognos.com/products/planning_consolidation/controller/index.html
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