Interactive planning and analytics workspace
Volatility, uncertainty and risk have been increasing for years —and they’re not going away any time soon. But most Finance teams still spend an inordinate amount of time in manual, spreadsheet-based processes—collecting, consolidating and validating data. Because of that, these teams are often unable to deliver needed plans, budgets, forecasts, reports and value-added analysis in a timely fashion. In response, leading CFOs and finance organizations are seeking faster, flexible solutions to help them deliver deeper insights and stronger foresight to steer business performance more effectively. All too often, however, they believe they have to compromise between the ease of use and fast deployment of a cloud solution and the powerful, flexible, analytic capabilities traditionally available only in on-premises solutions. But now they don’t have to compromise. Now they can have it all with IBM Planning Analytics.
Multidimensional Analysis
Built on the powerful IBM TM1® online analytical processing (OLAP) engine, IBM Planning Analytics enables multidimensional analysis of large, historical and future oriented data sets. It integrates multiple data sources and enables comparative analysis of information from all relevant systems. Users can perform complex dimensional calculations and analysis of, for example, product and customer profitability, sales mix, and price/volume variance. Complex hierarchies and dimensions can be handled easily to gain new insights into business performance. IBM Planning Analytics simplifies the maintenance and administration of planning models and scenario-based hierarchies. This functionality enables you to model attributes and drill on those attributes as if they were a dimension, but without having to create a new dimension or add elements (members) to the hierarchy. The result is a more efficient database that allows more detailed analysis.
Data Discovery and Predictive Power
Leveraging the ground-breaking technology of IBM Watson Analytics, IBM Planning Analytics helps you discover new insights automatically, directly from your data. Guided data exploration and natural language queries based on common business terms enable you to work with your data easily and perform fast, thorough analysis. Automated visualizations with clear and compelling graphics then help you share results with decision makers. The statistical analysis and predictive capabilities of Watson Analytics help you see what’s likely to happen next and understand what you can do about it. Scorecards and dashboards help business users measure and monitor performance in the context of their specific roles and functions, which in turn helps drive strategy management and execution by helping align initiatives, resources and actions with corporate objectives.
Advanced self-service modeling
Advanced modeling capabilities in IBM Planning Analytics enable everyday financial and business analysts to create and maintain sophisticated plans and forecasts with little to no IT support. IBM Planning Analytics enables dimensional analysis and calculations for even the most demanding profitability and scenario models. Analysts can build models that integrate virtually any business driver into plans, budgets and forecasts. The result is that analysts can spend more time on value-added analysis, and less time maintaining spreadsheets.
Scorecards and dashboards
IBM Planning Analytics supports a full range of reporting capabilities including scorecarding and dashboarding. You can develop role-based dashboards and scorecards linked to plans and budgets and then share them across the enterprise. Scorecards and dashboards help business users measure and monitor performance in the context of their specific roles and functions, which in turn helps drive strategy management and
execution by helping align initiatives, resources and actions with corporate objectives.
