IBM Planning Analytics

Score8.5 out of 10

328 Reviews and Ratings

What is IBM Planning Analytics?

IBM Planning Analytics, powered by IBM TM1®, is an integrated planning solution designed to promote collaboration across the organization and help keep pace with the speed of modern business. With its calculation engine, this enterprise performance management solution is designed to help users move beyond the limits of spreadsheets, automating the planning process to drive faster, more accurate results. Use it to unify data sources into one single repository, enabling users to build sophisticated, multidimensional models that drive forecasts.

Categories & Use Cases

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Screenshot of Workflow management

Excel data integration
Ability to integrate directly with Excel data.
Category average: 8.3
Journal entries and reports
Ability to enter journal entry adjustments and produce reports showing all journal entries for a specific period.
Category average: 7.8
Financial data consolidation
Consolidating data from several entities into a single statement using US GAAP, IFRS or other standards.
Category average: 8.3

Pattern Recognition and Data Mining
Pattern recognition and data mining mean the ability to recognize hidden patterns in large quantities of data.
Category average: 7.6
Report Formatting Templates
Category average: 7.2
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
In-app dashboard reports and data visualization.
Category average: 6.8

Most Frequent Users

Top 3 industries using IBM Planning Analytics.

Based on HG Insights installation data

View all Reviews

#1 most frequent

Manufacturing

15.2%

201 installations of 1,322

“Planning is an integral part of manufacturing business. Planning derives other processes like buying raw material, production acitivities, finishing processes and budgeting. With help of proper planning tool, the activies can be planned and cost involved can be predicted near to accuracy. The tool also helps to analyse the data and represent the information in form of dashboard.”
— Senior Executive, Vardhman textiles ltd. (Enterprises)

#2 most frequent

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services

14.4%

190 installations of 1,322

“The software easily works with MS Excel and this helps us in working with known user interface and take decisions which are with with a help of this tool which is strong and Secured.”
— Design Executive Head, Dorto Design Studio

#3 most frequent

Finance and Insurance

11.1%

147 installations of 1,322

“IBM Planning Analytics is used to scope out various Financial Products and apply AI to find areas of optimization across our budgeting ecosystem.”
— Associate Full-Stack Software Engineer, John Hancock (Enterprises)

Pros

Streamlined budgeting and multi-scenario forecasting capabilities
High-performance data consolidation from diverse sources
Real-time calculation and extensive data modeling possibilities

Cons

Steep learning curve requiring significant time and effort to master
User interface and experience can lack intuitiveness for business users
Performance slowdowns reported when handling large or complex datasets

Wilson Quiles Vazquez

Sr IT Applications Analyst in Information Technology at Century Communities (501-1000 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use IBM Planning Analytics (TM1) for all our Budgeting, Forecasting, Financial Reporting and Business KPIs. We have a broad user base spanning Corporate Accounting, Corporate Finance, Marketing, IT Leadership and Operations. It helps us answer key questions to better perform among our competitors in our industry. One of the key uses and what our consumers love is the fact that they can complete their forecasting all from Excel.

Pros

Aggregations
Business Metrics
Financial Reporting
Visualizations
One source of truth always

Cons

Consistency across the user interfaces
IBM Planning Analytics for Excel menu options can be hard to navigate for some users
In-browser alerts

Return on Investment

Data load automation reduces manual inputs significantly
Fast and easy variance reporting to be more proactive rather than reactive
Sharing and collaborating within the platform reduces data extracts, manipulation, file sharing vs sending the workbook link

Other Software Used

Azure SQL Database, Anthropic Claude, Microsoft 365 Copilot

Marc Bastien

Chief Architect Data & Analytics in Legal at AGAPLESION (10,001+ employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Planning Analytics is perfect for Financial Reporting and Planning. It takes all actuals from the Data Warehouse automatically on a nightly base and through rules, all relevant KPIs are being calculated. Also it is used for forecasting, e.g. monthly rolling forecasts and for planning sales numbers for the next five years.

Pros

easy modelling of a companies internal business process into a data model
possibilities of rules and calculations are endless
very good support for aggregating, spreading and for forecasting

Cons

sometimes it is difficult to connect to SAP Data, which is mostlz not a problem of IBM Planning Analytics, but because SAP is difficult to access

Return on Investment

massive time savings in consolidating data and provide numbers to the management
one single source of truth instead of multiple excel files
high reduction in effort searching for "the right number"

Other Software Used

IBM Cognos Analytics, IBM Cloud Pak for Data

Sameer Agrawal View profile

Global Sales Lead in Sales at Boss of Intelligent Solutions Pvt Ltd (11-50 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Planning Analytics for our planning & budgeting. We also it for our own learning & leveraging the PAW for creating dashboards & other capabilities to showcase this to the customer. IBM Planning Analytics is now helping us to find out numbers, create some reports & through natural language interaction with PA Assistant it helps us to get hold on the processes & use the teams time to effectively for analysis rather than digging up the numbers.

Pros

Maintain Hierarchy
Business Rules & Logics
Multidimensional view of my data so I can see it from different perspective
Creation of subset & alternate hierarchy has helped a lot in maintaining the model
What-if scenarios are very helpful during budgeting

Cons

Dashboarding Capabilities
UI/UX
Ease of use and some guidance for users

Return on Investment

So overall it has saved time for collecting & consolidating data, hence more time for analysis & better decision making
Cell level security helped in securing crucial information leakage risk.
Although getting friendly with the IBM PAW required a lot of time but once done it was great to use.

Alternatives Considered

Anaplan

Other Software Used

Microsoft Excel, Anaplan

Rahul Ganguli

Solution Architect in Information Technology at HSE Analytics (11-50 employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

A very general use case is collaboration. I have worked with a team of 10+ analysts who were creating Excel files going beyond GB in size, and then merging the data and keeping complex calculations has eventually created a mess. Doing the same via IBM Planning Analytics let them focus on business rules and see the results live and in parallel. What-if analysis helps the users to forecast and take better decisions.

Pros

Forecasting
Budgeting
Planning
Sandboxing
What-if Analysis

Cons

Modernizing its turboIntegrator
Better APIs for the handling of integration
More seamless PAW and CAFE interface

Return on Investment

Collaborative Planning and Budgeting
Forecasting
Sandboxing

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Planner, Anaplan and SAP Analytics Cloud

Other Software Used

IBM Cognos Analytics

Cástor Villa View profile

Business Analytics Manager in Finance and Accounting at Citibanamex (10,001+ employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

At first, we put a lot of time into the design of the dashboards in PAW. Now we're pros at house! It was definitely worth the customisation. The results made it really popular. They cut the monthly forecasting cycle in half, from five days to two, so there'd be more time for finance to do their strategic analysis and higher-level review. Manual errors are minimised. Confidence is higher.

Pros

Our 18-strong finance team, as well as the heads of operations and sales, use it every day.
The department heads use it every week for variance analysis and once a month for our monthly close process.
It brings together the budgeting and forecasting process, and creates one up-to-date source of truth. This wasn't always the case.

Cons

Data sources are used to retrieve data from cloud resources like Snowflake and AWS S3, and load it straight into the OLAP cubes.
These multi-dimensionals can handle large amounts of data with ease.
This makes it easy to adapt to new situations, so models always have the latest info, instead of having to rely on ODBC or flat file imports.

Return on Investment

When you change one piece of data, it can trigger a whole bunch of other recalculations.
This reduces the interaction of users to a great extent.
It's really important to have solid model validation and detailed dependency mapping.

Alternatives Considered

Anaplan

Other Software Used

IBM Cloud Backup, IBM Verify, SAP Business Network

Adaptive from Workday

Anaplan

Jedox

SAP Analytics Cloud

IBM Planning Analytics

What is IBM Planning Analytics?

Categories & Use Cases

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