What if it were possible to have a single capital expenditure planning system that met the needs of divisions across the entire world and also allowed each planner to submit capital expenditure requests in their local currency while consolidating real-time in the home country currency? And wouldn’t it be nice to link capital expenditure requests, request justifications, IT work hours required for capital projects, and depreciation projections to better forecast all capital spending requirements? Decision makers could continually fine-tune projected capital expenditures to maintain forward visibility into their capital plans. And capital projections could be leveraged as indicators of future treasury needs and their effects on other organizational planning processes.

The Blueprint enables decision makers to reach consensus on a capital plan, while understanding the financial impact of their decisions on both income and cash flow.

The Capital Project Planning Blueprint BI component is designed to:

• Enable functions accessing data to fully participate and drive towards corporate goals and strategic initiatives. 

• Provide integration to the IBM Cognos Capital Planning Blueprint—a planning solution that captures planned capital expenditure data.

• Access and analyze actual and forecast capital expenditure.

• Conduct information gathering to drive corporate decisions around capital expenditure and their causal effect on goals and strategic initiatives. 

• Provide a framework so the whole company shares a common view to achieve the same goals and strategies. 

• Measure capital expenditure performance using metrics like original v. adjusted or adjusted v. actual

Contributors in business units across the organization input plans to meet business goals or strategies. These plans are reviewed and adjusted as needed to fit the enterprise-wide objectives. To provide a feature-rich Business Intelligence experience, a business-centric model using Framework Manager is developed and published to the IBM Cognos 8 BI server. Within the IBM Cognos 8 BI server are dashboards, reports, ad hoc queries, and analyses built on the published Framework Manager package and grouped according to the business function levels.

The architecture in the diagram below shows the high-level Blueprint architecture.