Deliver confident results faster with IBM Planning Analytics (Powered by TM1)

Plan, budget, forecast, analyse and scorecard in one solution for finance teams.

When things are constantly changing, how do you keep up?

In today’s volatile and risky business environment, how can you plan and forge ahead confidently?

For many companies, spreadsheets are the main tool for planning and modelling financial and operational performance. Unfortunately, despite our best intentions, this can be a time consuming and error prone way.

Move with speed, agility and foresight

With IBM Planning Analytics, formerly known as IBM Cognos TM1, you can transform your planning and reporting to have complete visibility. You can provide control and structure with driver-based budgeting, forecasting and planning, as well as reveal insights through business intelligence and analytics.

Translate your high-level business strategy through to operational execution through a systemised planning and reporting application. Speak with one of our Planning Analytics TM1 consultants to find out how we can help your finance department move forward with confidence.

QMetrix are IBM Certified Partners

How QMetrix can help your business grow with Planning Analytics

End-to-end solutions from analysis to design and delivery.

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Consulting

We get to know your goals and share our business expertise to enable you to move with the speed, agility and foresight you need.

IBM Planning Analytics | qmx_admin

Implementation

Leveraging the flexibility and power of Planning Analytics to model anything, we build the system according to best practice and your business needs.

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Training

We provide training and ongoing support, so your team can manage the Planning Analytics solution successfully.

Financial and operational performance management in one solution

Empower the office of finance to be more strategic, with improved business partnering to help individual departments plan ahead, take ownership and monitor their own performance.

Screenshot of managing budgets in IBM Planning Analytics. The screen shows relative percent adjustment

Manage budgets with efficiency, accuracy and agility

Spreadsheets can be useful, but they are limited and cumbersome especially when it comes to large-scale planning. Many finance teams can spend up to 70% of their time on data collection and validation (CFO magazine, Nov 2017).

With IBM Planning Analytics (TM1) you can automate the process for planning, budgeting, forecasting and reporting – and spend more time on value-add analysis and business partnering.

Planning Analytics features a customisable, easy-to-use web-based interface, as well as intuitive drag and drop capability for analysis, reporting and visual analytics.

Planning Analytics can also leverage the familiar Excel interface for inputs and analysis – but is powered by technology that omits human errors commonly made using just Excel spreadsheets.

With the option to choose and leverage the ideal interface that best suits your end users, user adoption is not an issue.

Financial management reporting

Every organisation requires financial and management reporting, often on a monthly, quarterly or yearly basis.

With IBM Planning Analytics (TM1), this process is more efficient, accurate and timely, while also providing greater insights due to its automation capabilities and calculation engine. You can:

  • Automate department or cost centre re-allocations using built-in drivers and calculations
  • Automate elimination entries and consolidation rules
  • Enable statutory and management reporting using alternative hierarchies
  • Have complex reporting structures; combining account/category with activity and cost centre reporting
  • Have multi-dimension data, allowing for analysis from varying viewpoints
IBM Planning Analytics | qmx_admin
IBM Planning Analytics | qmx_admin

Integrate with any number of source systems

Automatically source data from your source systems and harness that data to gain insights, giving you a thorough understanding of your organisation to improve decision making.

Slice and dice your data any way you like whether it is financial or operational metrics, and drill down to detailed transactions to identify where the underlying issues are.

Best of all, leverage this business intelligence capability together with planning for a comprehensive and complete performance management solution.

Powerful, flexible and scalable

IBM Planning Analytics is powered by one of the best in-memory calculation engines available, allowing for the most sophisticated and complex modelling to take place without any hit to performance. The application is scalable to handle hundreds of users all logged in and entering in data at once.

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Screenshot of how multi-dimensional scenarios can be modelled and viewed in IBM Planning Analytics

Model multi-dimensional scenarios

The market is constantly changing. What if you wanted to do things differently? With IBM Planning Analytics you can test assumptions and explore scenarios in-depth to see the impact of alternative decisions.

What if we opened a new store, expanded our product range or increased our prices? How would these changes impact our financial position and cashflow? 

Through what-if analysis capability, you can play and tinker around with as many different scenarios as you want from the best case to the worst case to better plan for the long term.

Visualise your data in a customisable workspace

Easily construct planning input templates and convey important information to cost centre owners and business managers in the way that best suits them.

Leverage impressive graphs and charts for dashboards, or crosstabs and tables for those who like to see detailed metrics. With IBM Planning Analytics there is flexibility to customise and create the ideal workspace interface.

Visualise your data in IBM Planning Analytics: IBM Planning Analytics screen with colourful charts and graphs

See how it works

See how IBM Planning Analytics puts budgeting, forecasting, analysis and scorecarding at your fingertips. Watch the video.

Want a personalised tour of how IBM Planning Analytics works?

Why IBM Planning Analytics?

The key strength of IBM Planning Analytics (formerly TM1) is its flexibility and power to model anything, from the most granular retail store and product SKU plans to comprehensive mining industry life of mine (LOM) 30 year plans.

With Planning Analytics, take the risk out of traditional multi-sheet and workbook Excel spreadsheet planning models that only one person in your finance department of a multi-million dollar business can untangle.
  • Powerful, fast and scalable modelling capability
  • Anytime, anywhere access on the web and mobile
  • Customisable user interface with the ability to plan and visually analyse all in one interface
  • Integration with Microsoft Excel to plan and analyse in Excel – particularly useful for month-end and board reports
  • Integrate with any source system for automatic data feeds
  • Multi-dimensional what-if scenario planning
  • Real time cross-team collaboration to drive accountability in the planning process
  • Cuts planning and consolidation time by up to 70%

Reduce budget cycles by 70%

The Monash IVF Group had several operational systems, difficulty tracking performance, and issues with the long budgeting process. Learn how their solution provided:

∙ A single solution which integrates bespoke data sources
∙ Accurate and timely information to management daily
∙ The means to optimise resources and drive profitability

Frequently Asked Questions

IBM Planning Analytics (TM1) is a Corporate Performance Management (CPM) platform which provides both enterprise grade Budgeting and Planning, as well as Business Intelligence and Analytics all in one platform to help business plan and track their performance.

It is designed for all areas of an organisation to help the office of finance to collaborate and integrate plans across finance, sales, supply chain, operations, HR and more. Highly customisable and flexible, it can handle and cater for the most complex of business models from the most granular retail store and product SKU plans to comprehensive mining industry life of mine (LOM) 30 year plans.

IBM Planning Analytics (TM1) has a proven track record of driving efficient and effective planning and reporting solutions across a wide array of industries and business sizes worldwide. It has a large footprint in Australia and has been helping organisations from big telcos, banks and mining to a wide variety of SMEs for over a decade.

When you choose to partner with QMetrix, we first understand your business’ needs so we can recommend the right solution for you. Our team of consultants will work with you to identify the biggest pain points and biggest wins, and target them first to ensure the quickest return on investment. We also ensure the solution can grow with your business in the long term.

We are happy to provide a free proof of concept to help you ensure you make the right investment decision.

As experienced finance qualified consultants (CA/CPA), we understand the pains of going through manual reporting, budgeting and forecasting cycles using Excel spreadsheets and producing board packs.

We have implemented IBM Cognos Analytics and IBM Planning Analytics (TM1) for many businesses successfully. QMetrix TM1 consultants have worked with a vast array of clients and industries and can bring that combined knowledge to deliver an innovative solution for your specific business.

We take time to understand your critical business drivers and design models using our best practice implementation methodology. We also ensure the finance team can maintain and manage the Planning Analytics models going forward in line with business changes. If you need any help after implementation, we are only a phone call away.

Learn more about our process and what QMetrix clients can expect.

The licencing model for IBM Planning Analytics (TM1) will depend on whether your business chooses cloud or on-premise.

With the cloud option, the pricing is an annual subscription and you can easily scale up or down to suit the changing needs of the business. As with all cloud solutions there are no hidden infrastructure or internal costs.

Planning Analytics is also available on-premise with the licencing higher in the first year when compared to the cloud option. However the subsequent years are much cheaper. It is important to factor in costs associated with on-premise hosting.

QMetrix can help you work out the pros and cons to decide which option is best suited for your business.

A planning and reporting model based on IBM Planning Analytics (TM1) can be implemented from as little as 3 to 4 weeks. Much of this will depend on the complexity and number of models to be undertaken. Our experienced TM1 consultants will work with you to identify the scope and what is achievable within your timeframe and budget.

At QMetrix, we will always undertake one or more scoping workshops before providing a detailed quote that clearly defines the deliverables and expected outcomes. As a rough guide, a typical first phase implementation can range anywhere from 3 weeks to 10 weeks.

Want your finance team to be more analytical to support and partner with the business?

Leverage IBM Planning Analytics to streamline your planning and analysis.

IBM Planning Analytics

Following the IBM Insight 2015 event, IBM announced “IBM Planning Analytics” as a cloud offering going live for customers today.

The offering includes a combination of technologies such as TM1, Watson Analytics and Cognos BI. The Watson and BI components are only limited and restricted to the TM1 or planning data only though. Obviously as a cloud based offering the licensing is therefore subscription based.

With Planning Analytics, the look and feel of TM1 has also been updated with much belated enhancements in the way TM1 presents itself with a front end called “Planning Analytics Workspace”, as well as updated visualisations borrowed from Watson/Cognos. The integration with Watson and Cognos is therefore quite seamless (Cognos has also had its appearance updated).

Please note the TM1 component of Planning Analytics with its updated look and feel is not available for on premise TM1 just yet. This is still being worked on by IBM with big changes anticipated in the areas of TM1 Web, CAFE as a replacement for Perspectives, server updates and obviously the integration of the Planning Analytics Workspace front end.

What does this mean for me? Well if you are an existing TM1 user and happy with the on premise solution, then not much. This offering basically serves as a precursor or sneak peak into the on premise version of TM1. If you are looking at a cloud or SaaS strategy with your existing TM1 solution or looking at a new cloud based budgeting and forecasting solution then IBM Planning Analytics should certainly be considered. Here are a few of the benefits:

  • Speed and cost savings to startup
  • Reduce IT maintenance hosting costs
  • Access to automatic updates and patches
  • Data center redundancy with robust data recovery
  • Pay as you go operating expenditure vs capital expenditure which is easier on cashflow

Stay tuned for the new Cognos Analytics (Cognos BI) update, as well as any news or updates regarding the next release of TM1.

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