IBM Planning Analytics Rocks! (esp. Excel integration!)
June 21, 2019
IBM Planning Analytics Rocks! (esp. Excel integration!)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with IBM Planning Analytics Local
My company's finance team leverages IBM Planning Analytics for budgeting, forecasting and analysis. I am the budget owner for one of the larger cost centers and hence interact with the tool during planning cycles. The tool is being heavily used by finance and moderately used by different business units across the company.
- Robust computing capabilities
- Single-source-of truth for actuals and forecast
- Capable of handling large data sets
- Empowers analysts to spend more time analyzing
- Great Excel integration
- User interface could be more modern and intuitive
- Better capability to brand the tool to fit your company's aesthetic
- Built in / out of the box stock-based-compensation modeling
- More colors and fonts for visualizations
- Single-source-of-truth for actuals and forecast
- More accurate forecasts due to advance computing power
- Faster forecasting process can forecast concurrently vs sequentially
- Greater planning efficiency
- Better financial results visibility
- Host Analytics Cloud EPM Suite, Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud, Anaplan, Tidemark, Adaptive Insights and a Workday company
IBM Planning Analytics is most similar to Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud, another legacy on premise forecasting tool. I would say where IBM Planning Analytics really shines is with the Excel integration which I have found to be the best / de-facto standard in the industry. It's really powerful and gives analysts a lot of horsepower and comfort. The cube structure is also pretty flexible / adaptive but does likely require a developer. Support is generally heavier for this tool relative to the SaaS competitors.