Planning Analytics

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  • 1.  What's new in IBM Planning Analytics Applications, Plans & Workflow

    Community Leadership
    Posted Tue November 03, 2020 03:13 PM
    Edited by System Fri January 20, 2023 04:48 PM
    Join us to learn more about the new plans and application capabilities in IBM Planning Analytics. In this session, we'll introduce you to guided planning – an entirely new way of creating customized applications to manage, facilitate, and increase participation in your company's budgeting, forecasting and reporting processes. Guided planning allows Budget and Planning Managers to create plans with multiple stages, and multiple steps within each stage. Once created, Planning Managers can then invite participants, outline submission requirements, assign due dates and monitor the progress of plan activities.

    Want to love planning again? We'll show you how to provide a guided planning experience for your planning participants that is easy navigate and easy to complete with IBM Planning Analytics.

    Tune in with @Mark Kiel in this on demand webinar, 
    What's new in IBM Planning Analytics Applications, Plans & Workflow. 

    Share your questions below and you can watch the on demand recording here. 

    Thanks,

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    NICKOLUS PLOWDEN
    Check out the Cognos Analytics Webinar Series: https://bit.ly/2M7sciX
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    #PlanningAnalyticswithWatson


  • 2.  RE: What's new in IBM Planning Analytics Applications, Plans & Workflow

    Community Leadership
    Posted Wed November 11, 2020 01:42 PM

    Hello everyone, 
    You can watch the on demand recording here and download the slides from here. 



    Please include your questions below. 

    Thanks, 



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    NICKOLUS PLOWDEN
    Check out the Cognos Analytics Webinar Series: https://bit.ly/2M7sciX
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  • 3.  RE: What's new in IBM Planning Analytics Applications, Plans & Workflow

    Posted Thu November 12, 2020 06:34 AM
    Hi Mark

    I am unclear as to how the Group submission works. We have security groups controlling access, however, a security group can give access to a number of cost centres. We need to control workflow at the cost centre level, not just at group level. There needs to be the ability to see how many cost centres have been submitted. We have all of this at present as well as forecasts and budgets being made read only on submission, which is very important.

    The proposed workflow only seems to have submission and reset. We have multiple review stages. We operate on the principle that figures can only be changed in the initial contribute state but once submitted various groups are responsible for approving or rejecting the submission. Typically there is a peer level approval and then a central approval before the workflow reaches the finalised state. That does not appear to be catered for in the proposed workflow.

    The main difference for us between reset and reject is that reject will generally require an explanation to be entered, whereas, reset is more usually where the submitter has realised that they need to make a change and they have asked the reviewer to reset their workflow back to the initial contribute stage so that changes can be made.

    There also appears to be no way to define a progressive series of workflow, eg to require users to first update Local Chart of Account to Central Chart of Account mappings prior to entering Forecast numbers.

    Other facilities that we have that are not currently proposed are facilities to skip steps, eg some partners do their initial budgeting in Local Chart of Accounts but make later in year adjustments directly in Central Chart of Accounts. We therefore needed to provide a facility to allow them to skip the Local CoA stage during monthly budget adjustments.

    IBM need to realign PAW and TM1 Groups. I am not sure why they were allowed to diverge in the first place.

    It would be useful to have the facility to be able to create groups of groups. That would give the benefit of being able to have Groups of user based groups and additional group hierarchies.

    I am not clear as to whether the planning manager is expected to set up a separate set of steps for each cycle. I don't think that is typically the case. Most cycles follow identical steps. There therefore needs to be an ability to reset workflow across all cost centres. 

    There does not appear to be the concept of a planning month as opposed to the effective month for which the forecast is being predicted. Many organisations that I have worked for want the ability to compare the forecast they made last month with the revised forecast this month, and also with the forecast they made 6 months ago. This typically requires a two dimensional matrix of planning and effective month. This also applies a month end rollover process to copy forward certain information from one planning month to another but with the ability to change that data, eg a different rate.

    It should be possible to tune the workflow by cost centre, eg to say that some cost centres can omit steps that are not relevant to them, for example, only certain cost centres may hold fixed assets. Another example is that some of our partners only submit at interim and year end, not monthly.

    Regards

    Paul Simon




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    Paul Simon
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  • 4.  RE: What's new in IBM Planning Analytics Applications, Plans & Workflow

    Posted Thu November 12, 2020 06:50 AM
    Hi Mark

    A few additional points. Some of our users use the facility to upload forecasts from CSV etc. However, this still needs to be tied in to the workflow.

    The workflow needs to record who submitted and when, as well as who approved/rejected and when. We retain the latest information for this in TM1 and a history in SQL.

    Regards

    Paul Simon

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    Paul Simon
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  • 5.  RE: What's new in IBM Planning Analytics Applications, Plans & Workflow

    Posted Thu July 27, 2023 03:24 PM

    Good morning,

    The presentation is unfortunately no longer available. Would it be please possible to re-load or point me to another demo explaning the workflow capabilities / guided planning possibilities in IBM Planning Analytics?

    Thank you

    Best regards

    Kazimir Szunyogh



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    Kazimir Szunyogh
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  • 6.  RE: What's new in IBM Planning Analytics Applications, Plans & Workflow

    Posted Fri November 20, 2020 11:32 AM

    We have been doing some "proof of concept" of the "Plan" functionality.  We are interested in using it, but we have some feedback before we see ourselves using it much.  

    1. Most important:  we should have the ability to assign tasks to an individual and not just to a group.  We don't want the maintenance of creating a whole bunch of groups made up of one person each.
    2. The end user (in other words, the non-PAw Admin) should be able to refresh the status of the Plan (meaning showing which tasks are complete and not complete) without closing the Plan and then reopening.  Today it appears that only PAw Admins have this ability
    3. The end user (in other words, the non-PAw Admin) should have the ability to change a status from "Complete" to "Open"
    4. Most FP&A groups, including ours, already have a specific definition for the term "Plan".  It would be far less confusing for our users if IBM called this functionality "Workflow" instead of "Plan".
    Are there other forums to communicate this feedback?

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    Rob Stilley
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  • 7.  RE: What's new in IBM Planning Analytics Applications, Plans & Workflow

    Posted Mon November 23, 2020 08:14 AM
    Hi Rob,

    The IBM Planning Analytics team does read feedback provided on this forum.  This is probably the best place to provide feedback directly to IBM, other than the enhancement request portal (https://ibm-data-and-ai.ideas.aha.io/).

    I think that item 1 might be intentional.  At some point in the future we might translate assignments on the plan to security in the TM1 model.  Since TM1 only supports security based on groups we may be limited to groups in Workspace plans and apps.  Maybe we could auto-generate these groups or allow for users based assignment only if security in the TM1 model is not managed by the plan.

    Item #2 I will look into, might be a defect.  I'm not sure why the contributor user would need to exit and reenter the plan​​​.

    Item #3 I agree with.  I think this is a good case for an enhancement.​

    Item #4 I'm not sure I agree with.  Why not just give the plan or app a name the users will recognize?  Maybe we can consider some level of customization of strings in the Workspace UI in the future.​  Again, might be worth submitting an enhancement for this.

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    Stuart King
    IBM Planning Analytics Offering Manager
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  • 8.  RE: What's new in IBM Planning Analytics Applications, Plans & Workflow

    Posted Mon November 23, 2020 11:10 AM

    We have been doing some "proof of concept" of the "Plan" functionality.  We are interested in using it, but we have some feedback for IBM before we see ourselves using it much.  

    1. Most important:  we should have the ability to assign tasks to an individual and not just to a group.  We don't want the maintenance of creating a whole bunch of groups made up of one person each.
    2. The end user (in other words, the non-PAw Admin) should be able to refresh the status of the Plan (meaning showing which tasks are complete and not complete) without closing the Plan and then reopening.  Today it appears that only PAw Admins have this ability
    3. The end user (in other words, the non-PAw Admin) should have the ability to change a status from "Complete" to "Open"
    4. Most FP&A groups, including ours, already have a specific definition for the term "Plan".  It would be far less confusing for our users if IBM called this functionality "Workflow" instead of "Plan".
    Are there other ways of passing along this feedback to IBM?

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    Rob Stilley
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