IBM Planning Analytics Room for Improvement

Dirk Boeckmann - PeerSpot reviewer
Executive Partner at Beat2Lead GmbH

The new frontend Planning Analytics Workspace is not very good, it could be improved. I like the Planning Analytics functionality but it would be helpful if it could be more customizable. You can create a prediction and receive information but you cannot do feature engineering regarding the predictive models. If this was added it would be helpful.

The new frontends could improve, the older ones were better. They come with a lot of weight; IBM Cognos Analytics is inbuilt, has a lot to install and maintain. A flexible, lightweight frontend, with high adaptability, is more important than a large heavy solution. In these heavy solutions, you have to maintain the installation, do a lot of configuration, and have to pay a lot of attention to the size of the installation.

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PL
Senior BI Consultant at T.C.C. Technology Company Limited

The tool should include features for prediction. It can also improve the scalability. 

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GC
Junior Consultant at CMA CGM

Planning Analytics could be improved by adding automation features.

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Business Performance Management
March 2024
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it_user93822 - PeerSpot reviewer
BI Expert at a consultancy with 51-200 employees

The product need to be more integrated. It is easy to be lost in all the Cognos suite and to make them communicate/connect it to TM1, and the pricing is too complex too.  

TM1 is a bit expensive, especially for small companies who shoud look more at products like Jedox or Tableau etc.. Who propose all in 1 products with good looking vizualisation components

TM1 need to automate more things like feeders.  When you write a business rule in TM1, you also have to write another rule called “feeders” to tell TM1 where to do the calculation. But it appears to be difficult to automatize for IBM engineers. 

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AY
Systems Analyst at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It's highly competitive right now, and all the vendors are in a race to put out new versions with additional features. IBM comes out with new versions too often, and it has an impact on quality.

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EA
FP&A Manager at a leisure / travel company with 501-1,000 employees

It's wonky, and not super user-friendly with Excel. 

The use case is only by fiance, but It should be able to be used by the end-user of the business. 

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KS
IT Analyst at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Data visualization and development interface are areas which need to be worked on.

Improvement in data visualization
Currently in TM1, web and perspective data is visualized with limited dashboarding capability and also for creating fancy reports for top management. There is a need for incorporation of functionalities similar to QlikView or Tableau solutions.

Improvement in development interface
In TM1, the conventional development interface of process and rules are not development friendly, thus reducing productivity. I would suggest to have functionalities similar to that of Java development with Eclipse, auto population of functions and validations, etc.

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it_user321549 - PeerSpot reviewer
Managing Consultant/Director at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The CAFE Excel plug-in needs to be improved to handle all the features of older TM1 Perspectives plug-in for Excel.

CAFE is an Excel add-in that allows interacting with TM1 data from within Excel, especially for generating Excel-based reports out of TM1 data. It is actually called IBM Cognos Analysis For Excel, but usually referred to as IBM Cognos CAFE. It comes with TM1. For the same purpose, we have been using IBM Cognos Perspectives for Excel for many years. CAFE is a newer tool than Perspectives, and it needs to be improved to cover some of the functionalities that already exist in Perspectives.

We know that IBM is already working on improving CAFE. In the upcoming release, probably, we will see a lot better functionality in CAFE.

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VM
Managing Consultant at Cubewise

The dashboard is very poor and needs a lot of improvement.

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SO
President & Co-Founder at VERSATIL BPI INC

It is a bit expensive, but it does the job.

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it_user90657 - PeerSpot reviewer
TM1-Senior Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The surface design needs to be improved. The disadvantage is the old-fashioned surface of IBM Cognos TM1.

I would like to see a more modern design for IBM Cognos TM1 Perspectives/Architect. It is not as modern as some of the other products with which you can do your analysis and planning.

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JB
Director at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The tool's transport layer could be improved when promoting development between environments. 

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RR
Accounting Services Finance Manager M&S at a hospitality company with 10,001+ employees

I'd like to see an increase in speed on extracting the data. That would be an improvement. 

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it_user508530 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Intelligence Consultant - IBM Cognos at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

I think the software front-end on Cognos Contributor should be developed further to provide the final user with a better and clear design. The view where the user makes inputs and analyses data is not user-friendly.

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MA
Expert EPM (TM1 Cognos BI) at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

It would have been better if the solution was not just a tool kit. They did not embed some functionalities already developed, we are having to develop them ourselves. It would be helpful to have pre-packaged data functionality already developed and the only thing you need to do is configure and use it. 

When I worked with IBM it was with a consulting company, I have made projects for many customers and we always developed starting from nothing. They have already begun to integrate AI into the prediction forecast for the future. This will give the possibility to have a predictive data based on AI. I would like to see more AI in future releases.

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it_user358176 - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President & Business Head at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
  • Pulling data from planning crashes very often. if this can be stabilized in next version that would be great
  • Include a performance modeller feature at architect level
  • Automation of feeders
  • Cognos reporting modules can be improved to be more intuitive, and interactive like QlikView. And more generally, I think the BI solution's data visualizations based on maps are too poor, they should improve it by interfacing their product with Google maps for example
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Buyer's Guide
Business Performance Management
March 2024
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM, Jedox, Board International and others in Business Performance Management. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.