IBM Cognos 8 Planning is a business performance management (BPM) finance-managed solution that provides real-time visibility into resource requirements and future business results. It supports best practices such as driver-based planning and rolling forecasts. Cognos 8 Planning helps finance organizations with even the most complex business models to build enterprise-wide plans, budgets, and forecasts. Multidimesional drill-down and break-back features helps users manage data visibility. The solution is part of an integrated but separable enterprise-wide performance management system that delivers planning, reporting, scorecarding, dashboards, analysis, and financial consolidation.

Cognos 8 Planning helps organizations create, compare, and evaluate business scenarios, conditions, drivers, rates, and assumptions. The solution allows users to go beyond "what-is" to the "what-if" scenarios that are critical to forecasting future performance.