Planning Analytics

New IBM Planning Analytics capabilities, start leveraging them today!

The fall release of the Planning Analytics Workspace (SC57), the most significant update to the product ever, is now available for you to install. This is for local installation, a SaaS update is coming later this month.

For the last few months we’ve been consistently hearing from clients "The last few updates were nice, but where are the new features?" Well, no one is more excited than I am to say, they’re here!

This update is packed with great new features that we think you’ll love. If you’ve been following updates to the Planning Analytics roadmap, you’re likely aware of some new features that we're adding. These features include:

• New look and feel
• New charting and visualization in Books
• Guided planning
• Predictive forecasting
• More robust dashboarding

New look and feel

First off, Planning Analytics Workspace has a new look and feel. It follows the Carbon Design approach, giving it a 'lighter' feel and a more monochromatic look, which we believe will better fit into your daily work style. Many of the IBM products have adopted this new design, so if you use more than one IBM product, you will notice they will all start to have a similar look and feel.

Planning Analytics Workspace also has a new 'landing' experience that you’ll see when you first log in. The new landing page provides more than a content list, it includes 'call to action' tiles for guiding users. Content is arranged in either Shared or Personal categories, including favorites and recent lists, all of which is designed to simplify the user journey.

New charting and visualization in Books

Books in Planning Analytics Workspace SC57 has a series of new capabilities, including new charting and visualizations. Waterfall, bullet charts, and multiple-column/line charts are a few of the new options. Of course, your existing 'pre-SC57' Books remain fully functionality and available– and those Books will be upgraded to the new SC57 format.     Books

Guided planning

In update SC57, we have also added a new guided planning capability. Guided planning enables budget and planning managers to create plans that contain multiple stages, and steps within each stage. After creating the plan, planning managers can invite participants to the plan and assign them to specific steps. This allows planning managers to monitor progress of plan activities and better understand the status of each step. Blog here:

Predictive forecasting

Algorithmic forecasting is also new to  Planning Analytics Workspace. The algorithmic forecasting feature is the first step in a series of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, we’re introducing to simplify the use of Planning Analytics. Predictive forecasting uses historical time-series data to create forecast data - . Forecasting runs the data through a series of algorithms, recommending the 'best fit' or the algorithm that yields the best accuracy and fewest errors to predict a future value.  You can then add the forecast data to existing members and dimensions, or add them to a 'forecast' dimension.  Blog here:

We hope you’re excited about these new capabilities as we are.  If you’d like to learn more about these new capabilities, look out for additional blogs by the Offering Management team, which will be posted on the Planning Analytics Community in the next few days.  Additionally, we’ve provided a list of considerations we recommend clients read before moving to SC57  Considerations for Upgrade.. And as always, as you start to explore these new capabilities, we’d love your feedback on how you’re leveraging them in your daily planning processes.