Business Intelligence (BI) and performance management (PM)

Good decisions are the building blocks of great midsize business performance. The business intelligence and performance management system from IBM integrates software, services, best-practices, and partners. The result is better understanding throughout the organization, greater accountability, and actions based on answers to your most basic business questions:

• How are we doing?
  Measuring and monitoring performance with scorecards and dashboards to track your key metrics
• Why?
  Reporting and multidimensional analysis to gain insight and spot trends and anomalies.
• What should we be doing?
  Planning, budgeting, and forecasting that aligns operational tactics with financial targets.

IBM Cognos solutions deliver the complete range of BI and performance management capabilities for midsize businesses—all built on a single, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and with a low total cost of ownership.With IBM Cognos BI and performance management solutions, you can:

• Unite data from sales, marketing, finance, HR, and operations to see a complete, multi-department picture.
• Build a self-service environment that lets team members create, access, and modify information without IT intervention.
• Create reports for every class of user and every stage of the reporting cycle including managed reports, ad-hoc reports, transactional, operational, production, and statement-style reports.
• View reports, analyses, and other BI content using familiar applications and devices such as BlackBerry, search engines, Microsoft Office applications or Web browsers.

Work with information the way you want to, confident that the numbers are accurate and consistent throughout the organization.

IBM Cognos solutions help you:

• Create more accurate, more useful plans, budgets and forecasts in less time
• Communicate clearly across the entire organization using scorecards and dashboards that provide an at-a-glance view of performance levels and emerging trends.
• Track key performance metrics across processes, products, or supply chains, and drill through to transaction details.
• Perform fast analysis to get to the "why" behind an event or action.
• Drill down to discover underlying trends that affect customer behavior, sales, marketing, and supply chain performance.