Summary Level Planning
This document provides an example of using Cognos Planning to create models that solicit input at a summary level to ease the burden on contributors while still providing the level of detail required for management.

Cognos Planning Backup and Recovery Guide
Backup and Recovery recommendations for Cognos Planning 8.1 and 7.3.

EP Integration with Essbase
EP Integration with Essbase

Currency Coversions in Planning
This document offers guidelines on designing currency conversion in Cognos Planning models. Two approaches are discussed Centralized and De-Centralized currency conversions

Conditional Statements
This document covers best practices in creating Conditional Statements in Cognos Planning Analyst.

Flattening Dimensions
This document provides a technique for combining multiple dimensions into a single dimension to improve performance for large Cognos Planning models. The technique can also be used to reduce data sparsity in Cognos Planning models.

Cognos Financial Applications and Reporting FAQ
This document provides guidelines for using Cognos 8 BI to report on data from Cognos Planning 8.1

Integrating Cognos Enterprise Planning with Essbase
This document outlines the techniques and considerations for integrating Cognos Enterprise Planning with Hyperion Essbase.

Cognos Discovery and Validation Workshop
Document your business and technical goals and challenges, and chart a roadmap for project success. Articulate and share your strategy with stakeholders to build support for your project.

Cognos Planning Implementation Roadmap
Part of the Congos Solutions Implementation Methodology, this roadmap is your step-by-step guide for completing a successful planning implementation.

Enterprise Planning design & sizing diagnostics
Enterprise Planning models are dynamic in nature; they reflect the changing (and usually growing) dimensions of an organization such as its chart of accounts, products and customers. It is important that models are designed with this in mind. This seminar will demonstrate design approaches and diagnostic tools that will help customers to build robust and appropriately sized models.

Getting the Most Out Of Your Planning Investment Through SIM
This session will provide a methodology and tools for IT to better meet the needs of the Office Finance through a review of Cognos Solution Implementation Methodology (SIM). This role-based validation and milestones process provides a consistent implementation methodology for planning to establish best practices and reduce implementation risks. Through this process IT will better understand and qualify/quantify OoF needs and match it to the strengths of Cognos 8 Planning. This session will also review the Cognos Performance Blueprints which can be used to accelerate this process through established best practice templates.

Cognos Planning 7.3 Planning Links
Do you have a Planning model that is much larger than you would like? Do you need to let different people have different access to the same cost centre? Planning Links can help. This seminar is designed to explain the linking functionality and give you ideas of how you can better fulfill the needs of your users. The seminar will highlight the tuning functionality provided in Planning 7.3 MR1 which can enable Admin links to run much faster than was previously possible.

Cognos Planning 7.3
Find out in this one hour web seminar how you can further enhance your planning processes and performance with the new functionality of Cognos Planning 7.3. See in a live demo, how you can benefit from the new decentralized administration and component-based planning capabilities. Achieve even more accurate results in less time through faster data linking technology.

Proactive Management of Contributor Submissions with Event Studio of Cognos 8 BI
One basic difference between planning and reporting is the amount of process the two contain. With reporting, when a data warehouse has been updated, there is a single event that marks the completion of a task.

Proactive Management of Contributor Applications through Cognos 8 BI
When reviewing Contributor data, it is important to understand whether or not the data has been submitted. This is sometimes controlled for published data by virtue of the fact that the publish process is not performed until all data is submitted and approved at the highest level.

Allocations Planning
This Blueprint allows cost-center managers to allocate all or part of their expenses to the appropriate profit centers. Profit-center managers collaborate with cost-center managers to either accept or reject the proposed allocations.

Capital Project Planning
This Blueprint manages capital project requests, their justification, and the capital request approval process.

Discretionary Capital Expenditure Planning
This Blueprint facilitates planning for capital spending, while ensuring that projects adhere to established corporate guidelines.

Expense Planning and Control
This Blueprint uses projections from planning systems or other Blueprints, as well as actual history, to drive budgeting and expense planning processes.

Initiative Planning
This Blueprint uses projections from other Blueprints or planning systems as well as actual history to drive labor or capital expense planning for new initiatives.

Risk Analysis
This Blueprint enables a corporation to analyze and assess risks associated with future performance, and quantify risk mitigation strategies.

Sales Compensation Planning
This Blueprint enables organizations to manage compensation targets and commission payouts, archive historical data and previous projections for reference and analysis, and link sales compensation plans with headcount projections and integrated financials.

Sales Planning and Forecasting
This Blueprint enables organizations to manage revenues, archive historical data and previous projections for reference and analysis, and integrate the sales planning process into supply chain forecasts, headcount projections, sales compensation planning, and integrated financials.

Strategic Financial Planning and Forecasting
This Blueprint aligns strategic and financial objectives to synchronize and coordinate operational plans across the enterprise.

Strategic Long Range Planning
This Blueprint uses projections from the Strategic Financial Planning and Forecasting and the Initiative Planning Blueprints to assess the impact of market growth factors and strategic initiatives on corporate P/L projections over a five-year period.

Planning-Led Performance Management

Workforce Planning (formerly referred to as Headcount and Compensation Planning)
This Blueprint provides forward-looking visibility into workforce decisions at both the divisional and company levels. Headcount projections can then be leveraged as drivers in other planning processes.

Workforce Resource Management
This Blueprint enables front-line managers to align worker staffing and scheduling with business drivers. It is short-term in scope, but highly detailed.

Six rules for effective forecasting

When spending goes wrong

The hidden best step in selecting planning software

Balanced Scorecard - The concepts that created a new way of measuring organization performance
When it comes to measuring performance, traditional financial metrics are necessary but not sufficient. In an 18-minute webinar, Brett Knowles, founding partner of Performance Measurement and Management (PMē), explains how the Balanced Scorecard provides

Translating strategy into action - An overview of management's core roles-the development and execution of strategy
Most organizations have no trouble articulating a clear strategy. Where many fail, however, is in translating that well-designed strategy into action. In a 34-minute webinar, Brett Knowles, founding partner of Performance Measurement and Management (PMē)

Translating strategy into action - An overview of the Balance Scorecard (BSC) and how it drives performance by translating strategy into action
In Balanced Scorecards, as in so many things, it's important to not let "the perfect be the enemy of the good." In this 47-minute webinar, Brett Knowles, founding partner of Performance Measurement and Management (PMē), outlines the five phases of buildi

Making Strategy Execution a Sustainable Competitive Advantage
To create competitive advantage, an organization must break through four barriers, involving leadership, structure, process and technology. Learn more in a summary of research by the Palladium Group.

Creating the Office of Strategy Management
In an article from the Harvard Business Review, Dr. David P. Norton and Dr. Robert Kaplan describe the benefits of an Office of Strategy Management, and explain how it can help make strategy execution a continuous process.

Replace Traditional Budgets with Rolling Forecasts, Enable Driver-Based Planning
At the inaugural meeting of the Cognos Innovation Roundtable, 30 executives from more than a dozen leading global corporations, including Pfizer, Target, Halliburton, Best Buy, and American Express, met to learn from each other how to improve organizatio

Decide Where You Want to Go. Give People the Means to Get There.
Twenty finance executives from retail, logistics, pharmaceuticals, communications, high tech, and manufacturing came to San Francisco to hear from the senior manager of corporate financial planning for a large biotech company. He detailed how his company

Responding to Market Realities-Staying Ahead of Change
At the New York Innovation Roundtable, the emphasis was on the drastic changes required by unforeseen turnarounds in the marketplace. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the telecom industry saw a dramatic boom and bust cycle. The Vice President of Financ

Redesigning Processes, Redesigning Decision Making
The Finance department's responsibility is no longer just tracking numbers. It's connecting operational cause with financial effect across the organization and delivering critical information to end-users who need it. But what are the right numbers to ge

Article #1 of 6- Shifting Sands: Focusing Finance in the 21st Century
What does the future hold-stagnation and gradual decline, or constant, aggressive growth? A risk-based early-warning system can recognize major trends, assess dangers and opportunities, and enable managers to act early and decisively. Read the article to

Article #2 of 6- The Risk-Based Early Warning System
Corporate success can be fleeting. The first article in this series challenges finance organizations to help their companies identify threats to long-term survival and to develop "dynamic planning processes" to cope with continuous market turmoil.

Cognos 8 Planning 8.2 Analyst Model Building
A five-day, instructor-led course that teaches application administrators and model designers how to design and build models for business planning.

Cognos 8 Planning 8.2 Contributor Application Administration
A four-day, instructor-led course in which participants will learn to build, administer, and deploy Contributor applications through the Contributor Administration Console.

Cognos 8 Planning 8.2 Technical Administration
A three-day, instructor-led course that combines lecture material and hands-on practice in installing, administering, and troubleshooting Analyst and Contributor.

Cognos 8 Planning 8.2 What's New
A two-day, instructor-led course that introduces current Cognos Planning Application Administrators and Technical Administrators to the new features in Cognos 8 Planning 8.2/8.3.

Cognos Planning 7.3/8.1 Contributor QuickStart CBT
CBT provides the business user with a solid understanding of the Contributor Web application.

Cognos Planning 7.3/8.1 FastTrack
A 5-day, instructor-led course which is a high-level, technical overview that covers standard content in an accelerated and appended format.