Planning Analytics

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  • 1.  UI Suggestions for Applications and Plans

    Posted Fri January 15, 2021 10:25 AM
    I've been experimenting with Applications and Plans a fair bit recently, and found the functionality useful with the exception of the lack of a proper approval process for submissions.

    I do have a few suggestions though for simple usability improvements and would be interested to see if others felt the same.

    When using an Application or a Plan it would be useful to be able to minimise the left hand navigation panel to create more real estate.

    It would also be good if the text in the left hand pane did not split words in half depending on the width of the pane, instead carry the whole word down onto the next line.

    As an administrator the default action when clicking on an application or a plan is to go into edit mode, rather than launch the application or plan, for end users this is less of a problem as the plan opens, but for demo purposes (logged on as an administrator) it's a bit fiddly having to click on the 3 dots to select Open Contribution, maybe this should be the default action and editing the application or plan is selected from the 3 dots.

    Re. the previous paragraph, the terminology Open Contribution is meaningless to current users, this refers to the old Cognos Enterprise Planning or Performance Modeller terminology, maybe this should say Open Plan or Open Application depending on the type of activity.

    I'm presuming the database that holds the submission status for each stage of a plan is held in the Planning Analytics Workspace database and is therefore not available for custom reporting that we could do from a TM1 control cube. With that in mind it would be good if a Submission status screen would be more readily available rather than having to dig into the plan and click on the submissions to see how things are going.


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    Mark White
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    #PlanningAnalyticswithWatson


  • 2.  RE: UI Suggestions for Applications and Plans

    IBM Champion
    Posted Fri January 15, 2021 11:39 AM
    With regards to being able to minimise the navigation panel, you can do that in 59 by clicking on the "Plan Sidebar" icon (and then click again to expand.)
    I think this was possible in 57/78 also but not 100% sure.

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    Declan Rodger
    Technical Director
    Spitfire Analytics
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  • 3.  RE: UI Suggestions for Applications and Plans

    Posted Fri January 15, 2021 11:50 AM
    Brilliant, thanks Declan, my laptop screen is slightly cut off on my desktop monitor and hadn't spotted that.

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    Mark White
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  • 4.  RE: UI Suggestions for Applications and Plans

    IBM Champion
    Posted Mon January 18, 2021 05:01 PM
    I am pretty sure I spend some time trying to click the "drag bar" that only goes so far to the left before I realised its just a case of clicking the icon.

    With regards to your last point I 100% agree that I would love to see a good submission status overview screen and a potentially also providing a screen where we can allocate a TI process to run when the Submission button is clicked, where we can pass a parameter based on the "Group" that is being submitted for.
    That would mean that the Development team wouldn't have to look into a full blown security implementation as it would give us the flexibility to "lock" a Country etc in whatever way we want as developers and we can send emails etc automatically if we would like to.

    I imagine that would be less work for the development team than setting up a full blown security model like TM1 Applications has and for us as users of the application we get more control rather than having to adhere to a specific security setup... however others may disagree on that one and prefer an "out of the box" method.

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    Declan Rodger
    Technical Director
    Spitfire Analytics
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  • 5.  RE: UI Suggestions for Applications and Plans

    Posted Tue January 19, 2021 06:04 PM
    Hi 

    Personally I would rather that IBM provided the ability to synchronise selections with TI process parameters, and then you could build any workflow you wanted. The workflow that has been delivered does not meet our needs and given that the rules for the workflow for submission and review of forecasts, budgets and plans tends to vary considerably from one company to another, providing only one approach is never going to work. I would have thought IBM would have learnt that from the original approval hierarchy approach.

    For the moment we will have to keep on using TM1 Web.

    Regards

    Paul Simon

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    Paul Simon
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  • 6.  RE: UI Suggestions for Applications and Plans

    Posted Wed January 20, 2021 04:28 AM
    Agree, we're having to update a workflow cube manually on the workspace to flag the task as submitted for reporting purposes and control security and locking, they then have to submit again on the plan activity, if there was some way the two actions could be linked i.e. the plan submit could also call a TI Process (like adding a process to a button) then it would be one task and as you say Paul, would allows us to create the workflow actions the customer requires and minimise the amount of development required by IBM.

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    Mark White
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  • 7.  RE: UI Suggestions for Applications and Plans

    Posted Wed January 20, 2021 02:30 PM
    Hi Mark

    As you agree with me, you might want to vote for the PAOC-1-313 with the link below if you haven't already.

    Regards 

    Paul
    IBM Data and AI Ideas Portal for Clients
    Aha remove preview
    IBM Data and AI Ideas Portal for Clients
    1) How should it work. It should be possible to link a selection on the sheet to a parameter in the TI process behind the Action Button. 2) Some of the benefit was outlined above. It is not possible to build any sort of workflow/action based system without this.
    View this on Aha >


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    Paul Simon
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