Let me tell you a story. Long long… well not so long ago, in May 2021 when the Apptio ITP solution was newly implemented in the organisation, the pilot users were excited about using Apptio when they were given a brief on Apptio and TBM. However, they were hesitant to move away from their age old processes which used Excel sheets, formulas (the usual) etc.
This is when my Product manager met an old colleague over a coffee and they casually had a discussion about Apptio, and that discussion became the seed to our requirement. In Apptio learning modules, Apptio emphasises a lot on how you can leverage Apptio and get rid of the cumbersome manual Excel processes, reduce errors and improve communication between stakeholders. And this is exactly what came to my mind when my Product manager came over to me and asked me if this is doable. Being fairly new to Apptio, I was 33% nervous, 33% excited and trusted the Apptio help center and Apptio community should I get stuck, and that was the remaining 34% (allocation strategies – weighted average).
Upon discussion with the Metrics and Analytics team, we jotted down the requirements and created a detailed user story. After refinement, I immediately jumped on to the Forecast report which was mentioned as the report which the team used to download. The budget data automation and data link creation was done in parallel and the journal data actuals loading into Apptio was already in place. Although I delivered the output in the 1st sprint, I was watching the calculation times as I was aware TCO was in pipeline. TCO involves loading of a lot of files and considering this was a daily process, I was keen to optimise it in any way possible. It was optimised in 2 steps, one tactical and one strategic:
- Determined the underlying table of the report and used Upload Existing table instead of fetching data from the report using the Copy table datalink
- I had created a report as columns cannot be ordered in a table. Since report cannot output to excel (only TSV), we were bringing the report data back to a table and then exporting the table. I discussed with the business if the column order is important. When they confirmed its not, I removed this part of the process
Summary: Apptio helped the Metrics and Analytics team to save their manual (Excel) work of 10 days of 2-3 hours daily (20-30 hours per month).
@Debbie Hagen
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Regards,
Saaraunsh Rege
TBMA
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#casestudy#ApptioforAll#ACE