What is financial analytics?
Financial analytics is a discipline that helps you take multiple and granular views of your company’s financial data and use it to gain insight and take action. Although financial analytics has a wide reach and touches all parts of your company, it is especially useful in the context of profitability—a very important component of your business success and performance management.

Why IBM Cognos financial analytics solutions?
Imagine if you could easily find the answers to these questions:

• Who are our most profitable customers and why?
• Which products are most profitable and why?
• What are our most profitable sales channels and why?

IBM Cognos® financial analytics solutions provide the tools you need to measure, understand, influence and optimize profitability. These solutions also provide a rich, enterprise-wide environment that can help your finance organization impact all lines of business—from sales and marketing to operations and customer service. Using offerings such as IBM Cognos TM1 and Performance Blueprints, from the IBM Cognos Innovation Center for Performance Management, you can address the spectrum of your company’s profitability problems.

With IBM Cognos financial analytics solutions, you can examine, model and manipulate very large, granular amounts of data quickly and easily. Charts and graphs make it easy to see simulated business results and assess options. You can then take action to improve business outcomes in areas such as resource allocation for marketing programs, product mix planning for sales channels or agent deployment in customer service operations.

In addition, you can analyze current plans, study historic trends, consider new market factors and relevant business drivers so you’re ready to respond when business conditions change.

IBM Cognos financial analytics solutions also help you:

• Move from a cost-oriented reporting exercise to a forward-looking profitability model.
• Analyze profitability in all lines of business and departments and tie it back to strategic, financial and operational planning.
• Foster collaboration between your finance organization, management and lines of business for better decision-making.
• Understand, manage and mitigate risk in the context of profitability.
• Effectively allocate scarce resources to maximize profits.

There has never been a better time for companies to deploy financial analytics and take actions to improve profitability.

To learn more, visit the IBM Cognos Innovation Center for Performance Management. A place where people, ideas and solutions come together. The Innovation Center community of technology experts, finance professionals and industry thought leaders promotes proven best practices in performance management including financial analytics.

• Improved planning, analytics and "what-if" scenario modeling.

• Agile, self-service analysis and optimization of large, highly complex, rapidly changing data sets with real-time response.

• Unmatched abilities to analyze profitability, sales mix and price/volume variance.

• High performance, real-time, read-write capabilities.