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Three Reasons You Need IBM Planning Analytics / TM1 Training

 

October 21, 2022

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Whether you are new to IBM Planning Analytics / TM1 or you consider yourself an all-star, you could still benefit from training. Over our 27+ years of designing, implementing and maintaining IBM Planning Analytics / TM1 applications and environments, we’ve found there are three primary reasons for investing in training. 

1. Staff Turnover in the Office of Finance

According to Gartner, the U.S. total annual turnover rate will jump by nearly 20% from the pre-pandemic average. Maybe your Planning Analytics administrator left your organization. Maybe your organization is growing rapidly and needs to add more TM1 developers and administrators. Regardless of the reasons, training is a smart move when you have new team members joining the organization or taking on new roles in your company.

People often give their employers two weeks’ notice that they are leaving their job. That does not leave enough time for a company to hire a new employee for the position. Even if you are temporarily assigning the role to a current employee, two weeks is still not enough time to get up and running on your Planning Analytics / TM1 implementation. 

There’s also an additional complication – how accurate and up-to-date is your Planning Analytics documentation? Old and out-of-date documentation makes it even more difficult for new TM1 administrators and developers to get up to speed. 

2. Expanding use of Planning Analytics / TM1 to Extended Planning & Analysis (xP&A)

xP&A is an enterprise planning strategy that combines and extends financial and operational planning. Gartner describes it as “taking the F out of FP&A).” xP&A offers “cross-organization leaders an ‘extended,’ holistic view of their company’s operations so that they can pivot the business with greater agility and more rapidly model future business scenarios.” [Gartner].

This can mean using IBM Planning Analytics / TM1 for:

  • Human resources
  • Sales
  • Marketing
  • Operations
  • Supply Chain
  • IT
  • Research and development

There are many benefits to xP&A. The business unit leaders in these functional areas may not be the Excel experts that the Office of Finance are. Before rolling out Planning Analytics applications to other areas, you should make sure new developers and end users receive training. It will make a significant positive impact on your roll out and eventual user adoption and satisfaction. 

3. Upgrading from TM1 to Planning Analytics

Migrating from TM1 to Planning Analytics is a big opportunity to modernize your planning environment. It’s not just a standard update or migration. You’ll learn a new, rich data exploration and visualization experience in Planning Analytics Workspace. You’ll have a new Excel add-in, Planning Analytics for Excel (PAx). And you’ll leverage hierarchies – the ability to turn attributes into dimensions for faster and more flexible data analysis.

Migrating to Planning Analytics requires training. Planning Analytics is powered by TM1 but delivers a whole new environment for your planning activities.

Revelwood’s Planning Analytics / TM1 Training Options

Revelwood has offered TM1 and Planning Analytics training for decades. We’ve refined our approach, expanded our best practices, and have the answers to all your TM1 and Planning Analytics questions. 

We offer several options for training, including: 

All training options are virtual, enabling your team members worldwide to participate in training. Take advantage of our Planning Analytics experts! Contact us about training options.

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