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Let me preface this blog by saying that my trip to India was so insightful, culturally rich and filled with great people that it was hands down the work trip of a life time.

As business implements more and more technology to streamline their operations the benefits of saving time, minimising costs, increasing productivity and better accuracy are starting to be realised. This means this is hardly a trend that will fade anytime soon. If you or your business are not 'there yet' it’s better to catch up now rather than being left behind with the rest of the competition.

Good bye 2017! We're about to set our new year resolutions, and ready to jump into 2018!

Not without some hard earned rest though.

Although we as devlopers solve problems and that gives us a feeling of success and empowerment, I landed on the realisation that by documenting a problem not just jumping in and fixing it; helps make better decisions.

It's hard in our industry particularily when when starting to guage how good you are or how much you know in relation to the products, especially when you don't get to mix and mingle with other Planning Analytics or TM1 developers. Worse is that you don't get to see / hear about other implementations / environments.

IBM is truly living up to its principles of a focus on customer outcomes, restless reinvention, and diverse empowered teams. I believe there is no better reflection of this that IBM’s latest release of Planning analytics (powered by TM1)

No one anticipated that the next iteration would be a such a quantum leap forward. Both in terms of intuitive use, and cutting edge looks; it is refreshing to see IBM invest in this software to bring it ahead of the competition. That’s right I said ahead. To start, with certain installations you will be able to integrate with Watson, that’s right Watson! IBM’s natural language AI, the same AI that helps Doctors in treating cancer patients.

In this blog series I hope to take you on the journey from considering whether you should take the next step, right through to integration with Watson.

• TM1 / Planning Analytics is a robust tool.
• Typically with other software vendors you need to rely on 3rd Party applications to test. This is not the case with TM1 depending on the type of testing you need done.
• There are 3 major factors that need to be taken into consideration to define whether you are doing adequate software testing time, cost, and quality.
• Time and cost is easy to measure but the hardest thing to measure is quality. Especially with manual testing or human testing.
• In executing the same steps over and over we tend to find short cuts for not doing things the right or long way.
• There is also an associated cost with manual testing, we are not saying we will or should completely remove the humans but analyse the following below graph

Choosing or even switching consulting companies is never an easy choice. Sometimes competitors make that easy be ruining relationships but being the newest on the scene also comes with inherent challenges.

Although we have the best in the business, and we are landing new large clients being the latest player in the market is hard. Especially with customers who think all consultants provide the same.

At times Price seems to be the only way a customer tries to tell us apart but what’s on offer is always VERY different.

So here we are doing something else different, let us tell you about the difference with Octane

Our quest is simple; to be the best, not by our standards, or those of our competitors but as judged by the market, our potential customers.