IBM Cognos TM1 proves Flexible and On-Demand!
Overall Satisfaction with IBM Planning Analytics Local
Internally, at BPM NW Cognos TM1 is used for financial performance management including budgeting, planning, forecasting as well as operational reporting of balance sheet, P & L and Cash Flow analysis. The financial forecasting is partly driven by a second TM1 application which predicts sales pipeline and consulting revenue activities.
Externally, BPM NW offers ten individuals with nearly 70 years of combined TM1 development experience using IBM and industry standard best practices in a wide variety of industries including healthcare, retail, banking, hospitality, transportation, manufacturing, government and many others. These applications are often developed in conjunction with IBM Cognos BI report development and/or Data Warehouse development.
Externally, BPM NW offers ten individuals with nearly 70 years of combined TM1 development experience using IBM and industry standard best practices in a wide variety of industries including healthcare, retail, banking, hospitality, transportation, manufacturing, government and many others. These applications are often developed in conjunction with IBM Cognos BI report development and/or Data Warehouse development.
- TM1 is tremendously more flexible than the competitor products due to its ability to calculate real-time.
- Hierarchy changes are instantly available to take advantage of the real-time calculation. No pre-consolidations needed!
- Native write-back capability allows for simple, integrated budgeting, forecasting and what-if analysis.
- IBM is constantly improving the product and integrating with new products like Cognos BI, SPSS and is now beginning to integrate it with Watson Analytics.
- New cloud versions of TM1 are now providing some really great web-based tools to simplify and streamline the presentation development and strengthen the self-service reporting, analytics and what-if analysis capacity.
- The ETL tool (Turbo Integrator) is very powerful, but a bit clunky: It has no debugging tool provided and doesn't even offer a simple Find function. As a result, many developers use Notepad++ with a Language template to assist in development.
- Cube rules are an extremely powerful tool that is hard to match in the industry. The problem here is similar to TI, there is no debugging tool available, though the Rules Editor at least provides a Find/Replace function.
- The relatively new Performance Modeler (PM) has some nice features and can be a nice tool as a replacement for Turbo Integrator (TI) and Rules. The problem is that once you develop with PM, you cannot go back to TI or the Rules Editor and you cannot "tweek" the PM code to improve performance or allow for exceptions or special circumstances that the PM interface does not handle.
- Internally, using TM1 has streamlined our inter and intra-team communication.
- Internally and externally, TM1 has improved our accuracy in predictive analytics of our project costs and completion targets.
- Externally, we are better able to deliver the project needs of clients through transformation of their raw data into meaningful, appropriate, timely and insightful information.
- TM1 is an in-memory solution which provides on-demand calculations and consolidations with the flexibility to instantly apply hierarchy changes and allows storage and reporting of text.
- TM1 has an extremely fast ETL tool which can consume most data sources.
- Cube rules virtually stand alone among the competition.
- Most competitor products strive to match TM1 performance, flexibility and functionality.
- As an IBM product, TM1 continues to be integrated into many other "sister" products and has a vast R&D team with deep pocket resources available and committed to continued product development.