Sales planning with IBM Cognos Express
Our client, one of the TOP-5 Ukrainian distillery producers and importers, covers huge part of CIS countries’ market demand. Implementation of IBM Cognos Express was aimed to eliminate permanent headache with unmanageable Excel files from commercial agents and obtain rolling budget for a short-term plan and year strategic plan for long-term planning baseline.
Main difficulty for planning department laid in forecasting algorithm to get expected sales and deliveries data at least semimonthly. Planning department could not change the algorithm as often as desired because complete rework of Excel files should cause delays with plan calculations. These delays must be avoided for such company with sharp sales changes under such strong market conditions as in modern Ukraine. Other problem that had to be solved by planning department was secure allocation of planning data per cost centers.
Our cognos specialists in Ukraine have successfully solved raised issues with the help of IBM Cognos Express software. Cost center owners now have secured access to their part of the plan data via web browser. This removes limitation of cost center user’s location, connection, working regime. As far as data and metadata is now stored on the same server, it’s much easier to manage corporate repositories and securing access to them. Huge Excel files now are not sent via e-mail or any other data exchange route – reliable budgeting process is possible even for poor internet connection. When user enters data into the model, it immediately summed up showing the impact up until the highest level. So, finance analytics do not need to wait until the last contributor submits data to start data analysis. In addition, as this consolidation process is fully automated it eliminates the possibility of calculation errors through manual work.
The workflow management tracks the entire planning process and gives heads of departments the status of every participant. Also, IBM Cognos gives its users the ability to perform «what-if» analysis. Planning model could be easily back-upped, restored and analyzed by authorized administrators.
The workflow of the metadata processing of IBM Cognos software simplifies updates of product lists, contractors, subcontractors, sales force info, etc. It’s well known that IBM Conos Express software is the product that could be easily mastered even by beginner.
Resuming mentioned above, IBM Cognos Express is the best fit product for the customer that has restrictions for the planning software while wanting budget process to be easily managed, transparent and flexible.