Ironically, transparency is making us blinded by paper (and electronic copies) of narrative data.  The Wall Street Journal recently published an article called “The 109,894-Word Annual Report”.  This article explains how companies are having to churn out more reports and more information within these reports thus requiring companies to hire additional resources. This leads to employees spending more time on tedious tasks that require the skills of accountants and financial analysts. It doesn’t help the company analyze its data in improving the company’s performance and pretty much bores the employee till they find another job. Enter IBM Cognos Disclosure Management?

Since much of this transparency is driven by government and quasi-government agencies, do you really think this is just a passing phase?  Have we ever seen government become more efficient?  Notice that since the recession, just about every company has that boilerplate paragraph, “This document contains “forward-looking statements” – that is, statements related to future, not past, events. In this context, “forward-looking statements” often address our expected future business and financial performance and financial condition, and often contain words such as “expect,” “anticipate,” “intend,” “plan,” blah, blah, blah…  There is only so much copy/pasting of that paragraph into every report that can be done before driving someone nuts.

That is where the aforementioned IBM Cognos Disclosure Management (CDM) can help streamline your narrative reporting processes. It can make it quicker and more accurate to put together both internal and external narrative reports.  For companies in highly regulated industries such as banking and insurance, it is imperative to have the right tool to get the job done correctly and efficiently.  It allows for collaboration amongst contributors, in a secure environment and has tracking back to source data.

Watch this short 3 minute video that explains the benefits CDM.

Enterprise disclosure management—Combine financial data from a variety of sources with in-depth narrative analysis for internal and external reporting.

Financial management process automation—Replace time-consuming manual processes with intelligent process design and automation.

Security, control and governance—Manage documents in a collaborative yet secure environment with visibility into the report generation process.

Multi-jurisdictional XBRL support—Enable multi-national organizations to use a single reporting/tagging solution.

IBM Cognos Disclosure Management (CDM):

• Easy to use wizard based Integration with IBM TM1 and IBM Business intelligence
• Importing of Microsoft Office tools, such as Excel, Word and PowerPoint
• Supports Popular Data Sources
  • OLAP (TM1/Controller (FAP), Essbase, MSAS)
  • Relational (Oracle, DB2, SQL)

As an Authorized IBM Reseller of CDM, Lodestar Solutions can be your business partner to help get you discounted licenses and work with you to implement your reporting solution.  Feel free to contact us at Sales@LodestarSolutions.com for more info on Cognos Disclosure Management or other software solutions.