IBM Cognos Enterprise Planning to TM1 Transition Program

Cortell’s Cognos EP to IBM Cognos TM1 Transition Program

There is no doubt that your choice in Cognos' Enterprise Planning solution was a good choice for your business years ago.

But not only has technology dramatically changed since then, the chances are, your business has as well.

With the advancement and rapid progression of today's budget, forecasting and planning technology from IBM Cognos, significant performance, scalability, maintainability and functional enhancements can and will affect your bottom line. Imagine if you could have one solution to help your organisation better understand, anticipate and shape business outcomes. It would give you breakthrough results to outperform your competition. That solution is IBM Cognos TM1.

IBM Cognos® TM1 is enterprise planning software that provides a complete, dynamic environment for developing timely, reliable and personalised forecasts and budgets.

Rapidly analyse data and model business requirements for your entire organisation and use the results to budget and forecast with confidence for better business outcomes. More than budgeting and forecasting software, Cognos TM1 is a complete enterprise planning solution.

A multidimensional, 64-bit, in-memory OLAP engine provides exceptionally fast performance for analysing complex and sophisticated models, large data sets and even streamed data.
A full range of enterprise planning software requirements is supported—from high-performance, on-demand profitability analysis, financial analytics and flexible modeling to enterprise-wide contribution from all business units.
Advanced personalised scenarios can be created to enable an unlimited number of ad-hoc alternatives so individuals, teams, divisions and whole companies can respond faster to changing conditions.
Best practices such as driver-based planning and rolling forecasting can become part of your enterprise planning process.
Model design and data access adapts to your business processes and present business information in familiar formats.
Managed contribution makes it possible to assemble and deploy planning solutions for your enterprise and collect input from systems and staff from all divisions and locations, quickly consistently and automatically.
Integrated scorecarding and reporting— the complete picture from goal setting and planning, to measuring progress and reporting—is possible with IBM Cognos Business Intelligence.
Total control over planning, budgeting and forecasting processes is provided to Finance and lines of business.
A choice of interfaces—Microsoft® Excel®, Cognos TM1 Web and the Cognos TM1 Contributor client—allows you to work with your preferred look and feel.

Why Transition to IBM Cognos TM1 from Cognos EP?:

More timely planning insight with Real-time Reporting and Analysis - there is no time delay between entering data into your Plans and being able to view that data within your reports. No longer do you need to wait for a publish process to run. EP's Batch Processing is eliminated. Adhoc reporting is made easy with the ability to slice a cube view directly to MS Excel where your excel skills can quickly format an attractive report. With EP, reporting on data requires time consuming data publishing and manipulation, greatly reducing the ability to facilitate dynamic, real-time reporting and analysis needed by today's business decision makers. This dramatically slows down decision making and adds unnecessary costs to your business
Where there's the web ... you have access to your planning - IBM Cognos TM1 web allows users to perform their analysis in a web environment where no client install is required. Only a supported browser is needed to leverage the many charts and slicing and dicing capability (read/write)
Speed ... reduce allocations processes in EP from hours to minutes - Due to TM1's in memory calculation engine, TM1 performs complex calculations in real-time. In addition TM1 utilises a sparcity algorithm to optimise performance which means that it doesn’t perform calculations on cells where a result is not expected. This not only provides a massive improvement on model speed but also results in reduced cube sizes. As an example one customer reduced allocations processes in EP from 12 hours to 12 minutes
Reduction of ongoing hardware costs - As your business grows, your TM1 environment can grow, and in most cases without having to add new hardware. TM1 operates in RAM and uses a 64 bit calculation engine. This means that customers can increase the RAM on the TM1 server as required to accommodate larger models over time, without necessarily needing to add additional servers
Maintainability is substantially lower with more flexible modeling and far less cubes to manage - Calculations within the TM1 rules interface provide for considerable flexibility. Calculations can be made using data from another cube without having to transfer that data into the cube where the calculation is being performed. Cube design does not need to be so focused on performance impacts. More often than not, EP cubes are cut down in size because of the negative impact having additional dlists or larger dlists. In EP, most model designs are focused on optimizing performance within the limits of EP software as opposed to accurately modeling the business. TM1 allows customers to include all relevant data into a cube so that full business benefits can be achieved. Most EP customers who move to TM1 will find they have significantly fewer cubes with potentially much more data
Easy transition for your users - TM1 not only has Microsoft® Excel® and Cognos TM1 Web for your users to adopt ... users can now transition quickly using the interface they have been used to in EP. TM1 has the Contributor front end to make the transition much less noticeable for the end user. It is an almost identical interface that includes additional features such as charting and sandboxing.
IBM's Trade Up option for transitioning from EP to TM1 - Contact us for more details ... essentially IBM makes it easy for you to trade up your existing EP licenses toward your new investment in IBM Cognos TM1.

How can Cortell help you transition?

Are you considering transitioning from IBM Cognos Enterprise Planning to IBM Cognos TM1?

You no longer have to look at your business through the rear view mirror. Cortell has certified and senior consultants that have 7 - 15 years consulting experience and a minimum of 4 years IBM Cognos EP and TM1 experience. They are also successful finance and business professionals, with post graduate CPAs, holding MBAs and the like. This combination of experience and skills will ensure that we help you with the right Transition Plan so that your organisation can start clearly seeing what's ahead.

If you would like to know what the transition from EP to TM1 would mean for your business, request a meeting with one of our subject matter experts to show you and your team the differences between the two solutions. We will show you how transitioning to TM1 will improve efficiency and performance within your organisation's overall planning and reporting process.

We will show you:

the similarities and differences of EP and TM1
the advantages of moving to TM1
a best practice migration approach when moving from EP to TM1
how you can easily move to TM1 today with IBM's Trade Up option from EP to TM1

The key activities during the transition are:

Evaluate existing EP models (dimensions, cubes, calculations, d-links, contributor models, access tables, admin-links, publish process, user security, maintenance processes, scheduled chores, etc.).
Clearly define areas where TM1 technology can improve upon the existing EP architecture. This could include anything from combining dimensions/cubes that were originally split due to EP size limitations, re-writing calculations to utilise attributes/aliases, defining TM1 subsets and hierarchies, using TI to replace EP macros and other ETL processes, creating dynamic pick lists, creating new reports/active forms, provide drill-through, create conditional security, etc.
Design/build models in TM1 that address all pain-points in EP and provides additional TM1 functionality. Run the models concurrently to ensure accuracy.
Provide a roadmap to help you understand how you can leverage the new TM1 technologies to further improve their existing processes.

Request a Meeting

Call us on +61 2 9438 3940 to make an appointment or fill out the form below and a member of the Cortell team will contact shortly.