Item: IBM Planning Analytics
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We implement Planning Analytics (and it's earlier versions—TM1) across a range of clients. Clients use it across a wide range of areas including Finance and Sales and Operations (stock, inventory, procurement).

Pros and Cons

In memory calculations.
Pulls from different varied sources.
Nice front end web options with PAW.
Good backing by IBM.
TM1 engine.
PAX provides access to those who want spreadsheet functionality.
Cloud version means less maintenance with server installs and upgrades.

Still buggy in some cases with the front ends of PAW and PAX.

Return on Investment

As a consultant, this helps customers a lot so that we can spend more time analyzing their business, rather than preparing reports.
Also helps customers reduce staff needed to prepare reports once it is set up.

Support Rating

Support is helpful and listens to your issues. Sometimes there are bugs in the PAW/PAX front ends. They will get addressed, it just may take a little bit of time sometimes if they need to go to engineering/the next version of TM1. IBM also listens to future recommendations so new things are always getting added.

Key Insights

Do you think IBM Planning Analytics delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with IBM Planning Analytics's feature set?

Yes

Did IBM Planning Analytics live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of IBM Planning Analytics go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy IBM Planning Analytics again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Great for pulling in actual data from many varied sources to provide one source of the truth. Fantastic for forecasting/budgeting. Not really a transactional system, so even though PA/TM1 is so flexible in letting you build different models and you could do this for some things, I wouldn't use it as a transactional system.

IBM PA Yay Yay!

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Planning Analytics