Smarter way to manage your TM1 Support and Development

Here’s a scenario I see playing out across organisations right now. Finance teams have invested significantly in TM1 — IBM Planning Analytics — but somewhere along the way, the platform stopped feeling like a competitive advantage and started feeling like a liability.

Excel is creeping back in. Enhancements are taking months. The system goes down at the worst possible moment. And in many cases, the entire environment is held together by one or two people who are a single resignation away from becoming a crisis.

I’ve spent the last twenty years working with TM1 environments across every size and industry, and this pattern is remarkably consistent. The tool is rarely the problem. The way organisations run and support the tool — that’s where things break down.

In our recent webinar, I walked through the three pillars that we believe will modernise any TM1 environment — without starting over, without a costly eighteen-month project, and without breaking the things that already work.

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Effective management of Planning Analytics (TM1), particularly with tools like IBM’s TM1, can significantly enhance your organization’s financial planning and performance management. 

Here are some essential tips to help you optimize your Planning Analytics (TM1) processes:

1. Understand Your Business Needs

Before diving into the technicalities, ensure you have a clear understanding of your business requirements. Identify key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that are critical to your organization. This understanding will guide the configuration and customization of your Planning Analytics model.

2. Leverage the Power of TM1 Cubes

TM1 cubes are powerful data structures that enable complex multi-dimensional analysis. Properly designing your cubes is crucial for efficient data retrieval and reporting. Ensure your cubes are optimized for performance by avoiding unnecessary dimensions and carefully planning your cube structure to support your analysis needs.

3. Automate Data Integration

Automating data integration processes can save time and reduce errors. Use ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tools to automate the extraction of data from various sources, its transformation into the required format, and its loading into TM1. This ensures that your data is always up-to-date and accurate.

4. Implement Robust Security Measures

Data security is paramount, especially when dealing with financial and performance data. Implement robust security measures within your Planning Analytics environment. Use TM1’s security features to control access to data and ensure that only authorized users can view or modify sensitive information.

5. Regularly Review and Optimize Models

Regularly reviewing and optimizing your Planning Analytics models is essential to maintain performance and relevance. Analyze the performance of your TM1 models and identify any bottlenecks or inefficiencies. Periodically update your models to reflect changes in business processes and requirements.

6. Utilize Advanced Analytics and AI

Incorporate advanced analytics and AI capabilities to gain deeper insights from your data. Use predictive analytics to forecast future trends and identify potential risks and opportunities. TM1’s integration with other IBM tools, such as Watson, can enhance your analytics capabilities.

7. Provide Comprehensive Training

Ensure that your team is well-trained in using Planning Analytics and TM1. Comprehensive training will enable users to effectively navigate the system, create accurate reports, and perform sophisticated analyses. Consider regular training sessions to keep the team updated on new features and best practices.

8. Foster Collaboration

Encourage collaboration among different departments within your organization. Planning Analytics can serve as a central platform where various teams can share insights, discuss strategies, and make data-driven decisions. This collaborative approach can lead to more cohesive and effective planning.

9. Monitor and Maintain System Health

Regularly monitor the health of your Planning Analytics environment. Keep an eye on system performance, data accuracy, and user activity. Proactive maintenance can prevent issues before they escalate, ensuring a smooth and uninterrupted operation.

10. Seek Expert Support

Sometimes, managing Planning Analytics and TM1 can be complex and may require expert assistance. Engaging with specialized support services can provide you with the expertise needed to address specific challenges and optimize your system’s performance.

By following these tips, you can effectively manage your Planning Analytics environment and leverage the full potential of TM1 to drive better business outcomes. Remember, continuous improvement and adaptation are key to staying ahead in the ever-evolving landscape of financial planning and analytics.

For specialized TM1 support and expert guidance, consider consulting with professional service providers like Octane Software Solutions. Their expertise can help you navigate the complexities of Planning Analytics, ensuring your system is optimized for peak performance. Book me a meeting

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With the holiday season just around the corner, the air is buzzing with excitement as individuals eagerly anticipate spending quality time with their loved ones. As companies prepare for the annual shutdown, employees are gearing up for some much-needed rest and relaxation. However, amidst the festivities, it's essential to ensure that business operations continue to run smoothly, especially for those facing month-end reporting obligations.

Maintaining Business Continuity:

The holiday season is a time to unwind, reflect, and connect with family and friends. However, in finance, the show must go on. As your key personnel take time off the forecasting and reporting must continue. This is where you can lean on us to ensure that your models and users are supported throughout this period. There is always an errant data load or a report that does not work the way it is meant to. Our Octane Blue TM1 team are an expert consultant and would be able to track issues and fix them. And yes we are available 24/7.

Eliminate Key Person Risk

Key man risk is the phenomenon of placing knowledge, skills, and important relationships in the hands of one or a few staff members. If this key man is to leave the business, they take their knowledge with them, leaving the business open for risk. This is a position that even most key persons hate as it limits their ability to progress within the organisation or get a promotion. This key person also wants to take a longer break and holidays. When this key person decides to move on from the role there is a mad scramble to do knowledge transfer. We walk into this scenario all the time to pick up the pieces and take over support. And in all the cases the model documentation is non-existent. 

Scale Up or Scale down

Your TM1 requirements are not static - You have busy months, unplanned outages, and a business that keeps evolving requiring your tools to keep up to pace. However, most of our support models are stuck in the past in a static mode. You can scale up or down based on what activities are happening in your application. During peak periods your users would appreciate having someone that can fix any data load and reconciliation issues that could suck up valuable hours waiting around. A lot of our clients also like having active monitoring during peak periods. On the same token, you can always scale down your usage of Octane Blue when there are no active support requirements or enhancements pipeline. Being a Pay as you go support you only pay for what you use.

No Contracts

We have a 100% client retention rate. There is no need for us to bind you to a 12-month contract or any other mechanism to keep you as a client. We believe our service and expertise are enough. Therefore we have removed the need to sign a 12-month contract. You can use us as a once-off or ongoing. We will take the burden of ensuring you are happy with the service and keep using us. We also don't ask you to break up with your existing vendor. 

How does it work?

Octane Blue is a 40-hour unit of octane services. We do not differentiate between Support and development. You can buy however units you need per month. No need to stress if you don't end up using the hours as we will roll it over for another month. You can utilize these hours for any support tickets, enhancements, or mini-projects. For larger projects, we recommend Octane Projects as that gives you a higher level of governance. 

We also open up our training portal for your users so they get access to unlimited free TM1 training. As you and us both know a trained user means a reduced number of tickets. 

What do our clients say?

Large Australian Steel company

This client is the leading steel supplier and manufacturer for the building and construction industry in Australia. They have been using TM1 for over 10 years. They started using Octane Blue for their support and enhancements in one of their divisions. 12 months on Octane has transitioned into supporting all divisions. In their quarterly TM1 User Forum, the team reflected on the benefits Octane Blue has delivered for them:

• Mitigate Key people Risks and get an external view of best practice processes
• More frequent review of the Planning process and system health
• Cost-effective way to scale up
• Create Additional Capacity to allow the internal team to work on higher-value critical work

Australia's Largest Commodity Organisation

This organisation is a unique mix of agribusiness and processing operations across multiple countries. They are the largest grains and oilseeds storage, handling, and processing assets in eastern Australia. They offer a global end-to-end supply chain. They have been using TM1 across the organization for their financial reporting and Budgeting. Due to M&A activity, their in-house team was at capacity and they started using Octane Blue. Initially, it was for End User support but has morphed into Development, Enhancement, and support streams.

What they love is :

• 24/7 Support available to their global business
• Support and development are handled in a more professional manner
• Allow their in-house resources to focus on high-value work
• Reduced Cost of Ownership for TM1
• They can scale up Octane Blue to do Projects when required

All our clients are happy to provide a reference so we can facilitate a call with them. 

How do you start?

We ensure that onboarding you as a client is a seamless and easy exercise. We have our onboarding checklist that the team will use to ensure we have the correct level of access and work with your IT teams to get this organised. Post that we will go through model understanding and set up ticketing systems. All our services are SLA based so you have full transparency on tasks and status. 

You can start assigning us support and/or enhancement tickets. We recommend you get us to do a Flight check with you so we can gather a full understanding of the model very quickly as well as identify bottlenecks and complications built into it over the years. 

See here for more details. Octane Blue

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One of the interesting things about Octane Red and Blue is that there is no onboarding you can start to ticket on the first day of your subscription. Over time, we are studying tickets that the user creates and anticipate that the user will have the same ticket for the next month so we will create it in advance so that users will no longer make one, that is what we call recurring tickets.

 There is a lot of automation that we can introduce, and this will no longer require any human intervention needed during the process, and tasks that are ticketed will be automated.

Preventative maintenance is where we take a lot of responsibility in TM1 to make sure that it is running lean, running clean, and running smart. If you don’t have a ticketing system within their organization, don’t worry because we will introduce you to a ticketing engine instead of sending emails, we will set up a ticketing app and the users can use this. This will help us track the ticketing hours we have every month and track the number of tickets made every month and if the volume of tickets reduces over the months passed.

In one of our client’s scenarios when they started with us, they were able to have 200 tickets, and then over time, we were able to reduce the tickets by 20% every 3 months. They just started with 3 units of Octane Blue and by the time with 6 months of engagement with the clients, we were able to reduce it to 1 ½. One of our KPIs with this product is the number of tickets, we want the volume of tickets to drop every month.

This ticketing application we use will help us read that to see how well we are on track. Once, the ticketing app is set up we are going to give the finance officer a chance to become the ticketing board leader, with this he gets to decide the priority tickets. The users then begin the ticketing on the board and the finance officer will be the one to decide what ticket to prioritize.

The process that happens between the finance office and the users is important because this is where preventive maintenance takes place. This is where we will take responsibility for how well your TM1 is running.

Let’s say you have opted in for the 40 hours of Octane blue, and you are already at the end of the month and there are 10 hours left. An octane (that is one of us) will ticket to themselves – “Preventive maintenance”, which means that they discovered something in the system like a bug or an issue that if eradicated will give ROI to make running TM1 easier in the consecutive months.

A finance person will have an opportunity to do two things, it is to roll the remaining 10 hours forward for the next month or have the 10 hours remaining to do preventive maintenance. Either way, we will take the responsibility to drive down the tickets that have been generated from month to month.

The limitation

Before subscribing to Octane Red or Blue, you need these three factors ready;

• Project management
• Costing
• Timeline

Without those 3, it will cost you more dollars and we don’t want that to happen. Spending 16 hours on development only is not recommended because you will need to add more hours to keep your TM1 running.

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