White papers related to "Planning and Analysis"

Transaction automation frees time and resources that can be allocated for decision support and financial planning and analysis.

The global economic downturn is impacting the way we do business. Many companies are looking to optimize costs. The best way to ensure your company?s survival is through strategic planning. High-level managers face many challenges that can be overcome by managing risks and tracking project progress and budgets. Find out why the key to success involves having the right information at the right level at the right time.

Sustaining profitability in a landscape of volatile prices and exchange rates is difficult for even the best-run companies. One key challenge is to understand the real economic costs in your business and of your products so you can make accurate decisions about sourcing, substitutions, pricing, and logistics. Find out how to use the right costing methodology and have the right information?and the right analytical tools.

Accurate forecasting requires many different views of the business. Increasingly, the finance department must make the links between forward-looking data from core operations and explain to stakeholders how this will impact the balance sheet and cash flow statement. How can chief financial officers lead the effort to make their operational and financial planning more agile, detailed, reliable, and efficient? Learn more.

New economic conditions are driving companies to become increasingly cautious about the near future. But focusing on improving flexibility to dynamically account for change shifts focus away from budget accuracy?putting you at risk of falling short of shareholder expectations. To achieve best-in-class status, you must plan, budget, and forecast more efficiently for improved agility, accuracy, and corporate performance.

ABB, a specialist in energy and automation technology, needed a business intelligence (BI) and corporate performance management (CPM) solution in order to support varied business needs and processes such as sales control, management reporting, and planning. But the BI software ABB chose couldn?t cope with all the requirements for integrating analysis, planning, and reporting. Learn about the new BI solution ABB deployed.

The old way of thinking?you run a company through the once a year budget process?is on the way out in favor of new concepts and system approaches generally described as 'continuous planning.' The practical implementation of continuous planning is through rolling forecasts?frequent updates of financial plans that include integrating actuals data and rolling the forecast time period beyond the current fiscal year. Discover the concepts and practices of continuous planning, and find out how to define application requirements for integrating actuals, financial modeling and scenario analysis?the three foundations of a continuous planning system.

Line managers and finance staffs are frustrated by the inadequacies of spread-sheet based planning systems for delivering useful budgets and rolling forecasts. A major problem is the disconnect between the operational elements of a business and financial plans. What's missing is driver-based planning, a best practice methodology where financial plans incorporate assumptions about business activities which are modeled to drive financial data such as revenue projections, headcount, spend-ing and capital requirements. Learn how driver-based planning, empowers managers to do better budgeting and, in particular, improve the accuracy and decision making usefulness of rolling forecasts.

Today?s critical cash-flow and liquidity concerns are demanding executive-level attention. Turmoil in the financial markets is leaving many companies struggling to ensure the cash flow and liquidity needed for normal operations. Learn about software solutions that can help your company protect its commercial cash flows, improve visibility into sources and uses of cash, and increase control over global cash balances.

Although companies typically find it easy to accumulate data from their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, it often remains unusable or unavailable to the decision makers who need it. Learn how deploying automated tools for report building, planning, and budgeting, as well as other applications such as business intelligence (BI) and performance management (PM) can help your company make the most of its ERP data.

For many companies, spreadsheet applications such as Microsoft Excel are the principal interface for budgets and forecasting. Often, these companies find themselves in ?Excel hell,? a state of inefficiency and disruption related to using spreadsheets for collaborative planning. The result: frustration, and decisions based on bad information. Learn about solutions that can help your company stay out of ?Excel hell.?

Discover financial planning and analysis software that lets you fully integrate actuals, and plan using driver-based planning and reporting.

While business units cant escape from “spreadsheet hell” using a corporate business performance management (BPM) system, they can streamline planning and analysis processes with the right software solution.

This white paper is a transcript of a webinar hosted by SAP Insider and presented by IBM Cognos Software. In it, you?ll Discover how Nike?a leading global manufacturer and marketer of athletic footwear, apparel, and equipment?leverages SAP with IBM Cognos solutions to improve its planning and financial performance management process, driving additional business value.

Today?s finance executives must meet a growing number of complex demands and economic challenges to enable their company?s growth, profit, and risk objectives. Performance management (PM) capabilities such as financial modeling, profitability reporting, planning, budgeting and forecasting, and delivery of key performance information across the enterprise to a broader audience is more important than ever. Find out why.