Blog #2: The six best things from a User’s Perspective.
Cognos Planning (formally known as Adaytum Planning) has served many companies well since the early 1990’s, but is approaching the end of its life from an IBM support perspective, and the product is no longer being further developed by IBM.
Most of QueBIT’s former Cognos Planning (CP) customers have already made the transition to IBM Planning Analytics (a.k.a. TM1), and have reaped many benefits including better performance, scalability and powerful built-in reporting capabilities.
CP has always been popular with end users because it is relatively simple and intuitive to use.
What are the six main reasons why users want to upgrade to Planning Analytics (PA)?
- PA is MUCH faster than CP. Everything you do from a data entry and related calculation standpoint, will be much faster in PA.
- In PA you have access to a lot more data, way beyond the capabilities of CP. More dimensions, more items in each dimension, multiple hierarchies, many more versions, many years of data at the same time, and data typically at the most detailed dimensional level from your various source systems. Examples include, all accounts, all products (at SKU level if needed), all customers, all employees, all projects, and at any time unit level of detail (e.g. day, week, month, year, etc.) as required.
- CP has no internal reporting capabilities. You are required to export data to another reporting system to report on any data in CP. PA, on the other hand, is also a reporting system. You can create the reports you need directly in the tool.
- Everything in PA will update in real-time, if you want it to. For example, if you want allocations to execute in real-time, they will. If you want to see the consolidated results, at any level, in real time, you can. If you have different applications, (one for revenue, one for expenses, one for projects and another for workforce) you want connected for reporting or planning purposes in real-time, you can.
- There is no downtime in PA. If the latest data is being updated from the general ledger, this can be happening seamlessly and quickly while your users are working on their plans and forecasts.
- If some of your users want to work in Excel, others on the web, and some want to do both, you want everyone to be in sync, which is possible with PA. It has a central database which everyone accesses at the same time, from the user interface tool of choice: Excel, Web or both.
Contact QueBIT at upgrade@quebit.com for more information.
