IBM Cognos TM1

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: WildcardFileSearch

May 31, 2022 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

Depending on your business process, you may need to load similar data from multiple files. One such example is loading headcount from different HR systems. This may be necessary if your company has gone through a merger. Another example is if you have forecast data coming from several managers in operations that don’t have access to IBM Planning Analytics. Instead of manually combining the files, you can use the WildcardFileSearch TurboIntegrator function to easily loop through all of the files.

The WildcardFileSearch function allows TurboIntegrator processes to search for files within a folder. WildcardFileSearch requires 2 parameters: Path and PriorFileName. The Path can include ‘?’ and ‘*’ as wildcard characters. The ‘?’ is the wildcard for 1 character while ‘*’ is the wildcard for one or more characters. The PriorFileName tells the function were to begin the search. If this parameter is blank, the search begins with the first file in the Path. Below is an example of this function:

WILDCARDFILESEARCH( ‘C:\TM1Server\Files\TM1_*.csv’, ‘TM1_20220301.csv’)

In this example, the function will return the first filename that begins with “TM1_” and ends in “.csv” in the “C:\TM1Server\Files\” folder that occurs after the “TM1_20220301.csv” file.

IBM Planning Analytics, powered by TM1, is full of new features and functionality. Need advice? Our team here at Revelwood can help. Contact us for more information at info@revelwood.com. We post new Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks weekly in our Knowledge Center and in newsletters!

Facing an IBM Planning Analytics / TM1 Talent Shortage?

May 25, 2022 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

There’s plenty of news about “The Great Resignation” or the talent shortage/war. In some cases, the challenge is not in finding someone, but in finding the right skills. This is particularly true for companies searching for people with IBM Planning Analytics / TM1 skills. There is a deep talent pool but tapping that talent can sometimes be expensive and resource intense. It’s a months-long journey.

You might consider choosing to go with a contractor or freelancer. This may initially sound like the quickest and easiest way to solve the problem… until you hit a wall with your procurement department. Often contractors and freelancers do not have the business set up that meets procurement’s requirements. Or, if that is not a problem, you can run into the challenge of having your TM1 contractor/freelancer disappear on you.

Revelwood can help! We have recently launched a Staff Augmentation service. Maybe your TM1 administrator is taking on a new role. Maybe your administrator will be out for a few months on parental leave. This is where you can easily work with one of our Planning Analytics / TM1 experts to fill that hole – however long you may need them.

Here are some recent examples of how and why companies using Planning Analytics / TM1 turned to Revelwood for staff augmentation:

A global manufacturing company had their TM1 administrator resign. Revelwood had a team member ready to go the following week. This allowed for a one-week knowledge transfer, followed by a smooth start.
A leading consumer product business was starting a major Planning Analytics project and needed significant staff augmentation to both maintain and redesign the system. A Revelwood team of developers was brought in to supplement their in-house team.
A Fortune 50 energy company was struggling to hire an internal Planning Analytics / TM1 developer. They engaged a Revelwood team member who understood both the business needs and the technology needs to help prepare for their budget season.

Whether or not you’ve worked with us in the past, you’ll have access to experienced and proven Planning Analytics / TM1 developers and designers. We have 27 years of experience with TM1 – and will satisfy all of your procurement department’s requirements.

Think of us as the best team you have access to – experts ready to be called up when you need them!

Contact John Pra Sisto to learn more about our Staff Augmentation service.

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Planning Analytics Workspace Visualization Axis

May 24, 2022 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

Did you know you are able to create custom axis labels for IBM Planning Analytics Workspace (PAW) visualizations? Below is a column visualization that shows periods on the x-axis and a net income amount on the y-axis. As you can see, a generic description appears for both titles.

While this generic wording does properly define the axis, you may to change the wording of the titles to something more user friendly.

While in “Edit” mode for your PAW book, click on your visualization then click “Properties” in the top right corner.

Within the “Properties” menu, click on the “Visualization” tab then expand the “Axis” section.

Scroll down until you see “Item axis title” and “Value axis title”.

The “Item axis title” corresponds with the x-axis, and the “Value axis title” corresponds with the y-axis. This may change based on the visualization selected. We can use this approach to create a more user friendly description on each axis such as to “Month” and “Net Income $”.

We now have custom axis labels. You are also able to customize the font, color, and orientation of these labels.

Introducing DataMaestro, the Data Orchestration Platform for IBM Planning Analytics / TM1

May 23, 2022 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

We’ve just released a new product designed to make the lives of IBM Planning Analytics / TM1 systems administrators’ easier. DataMaestro is a solution for managing and moving data that saves Planning Analytics / TM1 users significant time and money by making it easier to manage data processing tasks with just a few simple steps. It reduces the need to create TurboIntegrator processes, which require developer-level scripting skills.

Previously DataMaestro was available only to Revelwood clients. We’re now offering it to any Planning Analytics / TM1 user. DataMaestro has earned many rave reviews from our clients.

“I have been an IBM Planning Analytics/TM1 user for many years and I wish DataMaesto was available years ago!” said Collin Duncan, senior director of FP&A, Extra Space Storage. “Moving data across all cubes is so efficient and makes my life so much easier. On a scale from 1-10, I give DataMaestro a 10.”

“DataMaestro has a great layout and is so intuitive,” added Theresa Alexopoulos, director of budgeting, Berkeley College. “It gives me a birds-eye view of what data movements need to be done. The Package History is easy to find, and I can see a complete list of processes – when they were run, how often and in what order. The email notification feature for scheduling Packages is one of my favorite features. I know immediately whether a Package ran successfully. Best of all, you can manage your data movements with just a few clicks. No more need for TI processes.”

Watch this short demo to see how DataMaestro enables you to:

Create a task (similar to a TurboIntegrator process)
Process data within a single cube or multiple cubes simultaneously via a single task
Make decisions about each dimension of cube data to process
Run tasks on the fly
Save tasks to reuse later, and more.

“For 27 years we have been offering best-in-class products and services for IBM Planning Analytics / TM1,” said Ken Wolf, CEO, Revelwood. “The original vision behind TM1 was to make the lives of financial analysts better and more enjoyable. Our vision for DataMaestro is to do the same for system administrators – reducing the time, cost and complexity involved in managing their Planning Analytics environments.”

DataMaestro is available for IBM Planning Analytics / TM1 in the cloud and on-premises.

Interested in learning more about DataMaestro? Join us for a 20-minute webinar on Wednesday, June 22, 2022, at 1pm ET. Register here: https://bit.ly/3FWMQgJ

Read the DataMaestro press release.

Optimize your Business Processes for Planning, Reporting and Analysis

May 20, 2022 by Revelwood

When was the last time you examined – and optimized – your planning processes? Have you made adjustments over the last few years to accommodate changing office habits, work from home environments and mergers and acquisitions?

If your business is like most, it handled the disruptions of the last several years on the fly, making small tweaks to your CFO tech stack and just getting the work done. Now is the time to take a step back, think about what can work better, and develop a wish list of what you’d like your planning environment to do for you.

Revelwood is here to help you! We have a new Customer Care offering. It’s similar to our Performance Tune-Up, but instead of focusing on the technology (your IBM Planning Analytics / TM1 environment), we examine, assess and make recommendations on your business processes for planning, analysis and reporting.

Our team of experts will work with you and look into:

Recent changes in your planning approach
Different departments or companies that may have different processes and how to align them
The level of complexity
- Does your budget/forecast take too long?
- Do you have the right amount of detail in your budget/forecast?
Items and topics for your wish list, such as new models and tasks you “never got around to.”

As a team, we’ll also examine any recent changes in your business and how your processes need to evolve with those changes. This might include:

Mergers and acquisitions
Changes to your ERP or Chart of Accounts (COA)
Management changes
Changes in your work environment – remove vs in the office
Changes to your revenue planning approach
- Growth percent vs. driver based
- Fixed time period vs. rolling time

Our new service helps you to focus on the “big picture” for your IBM Planning Analytics / TM1 environment, while also fixing the aspects that have been ignored.

Interested in learning more? Drop John Pra Sisto an email and he’ll give you more details.

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Mekko Chart

September 21, 2021 by Lee Lazarow Leave a Comment

IBM Planning Analytics Workspace (PAW) offers many visualization options to allow you to show and analyze your data in creative ways. This includes standard chart types such as bar, line and pie. But it also includes some reports that are not always understood. One of these report types is a Mekko chart.

A Mekko chart (also sometimes called a Marimekko chart) is used to extend a stacked column chart by using the width of each column to show the overall importance of that section.

The following stacked bar chart shows Units by State by Item:

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Mekko Chart

It’s easy to see that the total amount of units sold in NY is very large when compared to the total amount of units in ME. But what if we wanted to also visualize how much larger the total of NY is compared to the other columns? This is where a Mekko chart can help.

Here is the same set of data via a Mekko chart:

The Mekko chart still shows the breakdown of units by kit and it still shows the values for each column, but it adds a new metric by expanding the width of each column proportional to the overall percentage. In essence, this report is merging the concepts of a stacked column chart with the concepts of a pie chart.

IBM Planning Analytics, which TM1 is the engine for, is full of new features and functionality. Not sure where to start? Our team here at Revelwood can help. Contact us for more information at info@revelwood.com. And stay tuned for more Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks weekly in our Knowledge Center and in upcoming newsletters!

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Defining a Process Within Existing Chores

September 14, 2021 by Revelwood Leave a Comment

There are times when you need to change a process within an existing chore in IBM Planning Analytics. The challenge is to understand what chores will be impacted by a change in a process. You could edit or remove and process and then manually look at each chore to determine if it will be impacted. But who has the time for that?

IBM Planning Analytics Workspace (PAW) offers an easier way to check which chores are affected by a specific process.

Watch this IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks video and our FP&A Technology Director, Lee Lazarow, will show you how easy it is to use PAW to see all the chores that can be impacted by a change.

You will learn how to:

Select a process
See an option to show all the chores where the process is used
Determine if you want to edit the chore or remove the process from the chore

Check back soon for new videos in our IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks series. Want to be notified of new videos? Subscribe to our YouTube channel.

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: PAW Explorations – Row & Column Headers

September 7, 2021 by Lee Lazarow Leave a Comment

Visualizations are used to provide an easy understanding of large data sets. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words. However, what happens when you want to see the intricate details of your numbers? This is where IBM Planning Analytics Workspace (PAW) explorations come into the picture.

There are many formatting options for your numbers, but what about the headers? Do you want to simply see a set of rows and columns or do you want the ability to expand into the details? Do you want to differentiate values at different levels or do you want to use consistent formatting? Do you want your row headers to be defined differently than your column headers?

PAW makes it easy to create your preferred approach via some simple settings. The settings are found within the Exploration features of the Custom area. Within the area, settings exist for each of the four settings.

IBM Planning Analytics - PAW Explorations

Here is an example of an exploration that differentiates accounts levels and allows for drilling down to the base level accounts but does not allow for any differentiation or drilling into the time periods.

This flexibility allows you to define both the look and usage of your explorations, thereby enhancing (and hopefully simplifying) the end user experience.

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Allocations

August 31, 2021 by Lee Lazarow Leave a Comment

P&L planning models consist of a variety of inputs, including revenue planning and various forms of expense planning. In addition to these standard models, we are often asked to develop other planning components. One of these components entails an allocation process, which leads to the question: what is an allocation?

An allocation is defined as “the action or process of distributing something.” In business terms, this typically entails the movement of costs. This could include moving overhead costs to revenue centers or moving IT costs to other departments. The result of this process ensures that costs become associated with the areas where they “should be” recorded. This allows you to create P&L reports and profit analyses of sub-sections of your business.

There are typically three components to the allocation process:

Source – the original value
Target – where the value is moved/spread to
Offset – a negative value associated with the target; this is usually the same intersection as the source

The calculation is relatively simple: take a number and divide it by a total to define a proration percent. This value is called a driver and is defined as a metric that can be used to determine how the costs are spread. Examples of drivers can include headcount (for HR expenses) or number of computers (for IT costs) or revenue dollars (for a sales manager’s expenses).

Once the allocation percentages are defined, the process is performed by simply spreading the source value to the targets using the percentages. The process also creates a negative entry as an offset. The offset ensures the ending value is not doubled while also providing an easy audit check by determining that the net result of the allocation is zero.

Within IBM Planning Analytics, we often use separate elements to separate the source value from the allocation details. This gives us the ability to view the pre-allocated values, the allocation amounts, and the post-allocated values.

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Allocations

Want to learn more about allocation details or recommended best practices? Contact us.

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: WildcardFileSearch

Read More IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks:

Facing an IBM Planning Analytics / TM1 Talent Shortage?

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Planning Analytics Workspace Visualization Axis

Read more IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks:

Introducing DataMaestro, the Data Orchestration Platform for IBM Planning Analytics / TM1

Optimize your Business Processes for Planning, Reporting and Analysis

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Mekko Chart

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Defining a Process Within Existing Chores

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: PAW Explorations – Row & Column Headers

Read more IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks:

IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks: Allocations

Read more IBM Planning Analytics Tips & Tricks:

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