A global publisher in the areas of scientific, technical, medical and scholarly research has turned to IBM Cognos TM1 for a top-down approach to a custom technical planning model. To some, that might seem an odd choice, since TM1 is typically used for bottom-up financial planning and reporting.

But the company already used TM1 as its global planning solution, and TM1 would be well-suited to handling the publisher’s complexity and volume of products for which it wanted to plan. The technical planning model would enable the publisher to plan down to a very granular level, such as individual subject categories and product types.

An additional challenge was that to correctly design the model, the team needed to take a step back, reevaluate what it needed to plan for, versus what it wanted to analyze. For example, before using the TM1 technical planning model, the company would plan to a level of detail that included whether the books sold were hard cover or paperback. In the end, it was determined that for planning, it was not necessary to factor in the type of material of each book sold. It was more important to plan by category and by product type.