In the realm of digital transformation, the concept of digital labor has emerged as a game-changer for businesses seeking efficiency, agility, and innovation. IBM WatsonsX Orchestrate, a powerhouse in the AI and data orchestration space, takes center stage in this digital evolution. This blog explores the pivotal role played by WatsonsX Orchestrate in reshaping digital labor and how it empowers organizations to harness the full potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and data science. Orchestrate allows you to add and train new automations from a variety of sources, enabling users to easily ...

In today's digital age, businesses are constantly seeking ways to optimize their data management processes. One solution that has gained significant popularity is the migration of planning analytics to the cloud. This strategic move offers several advantages that businesses can leverage to enhance their data management capabilities. Why Cloud? One of the primary reasons why companies are making the switch to cloud-based planning analytics is the instant global presence it provides. By storing data in data centers located around the world, organizations can ensure that their data is accessible ...

With a variety of business intelligence applications at your disposal, it’s worth investigating the best and comparing your needs against each product to get the best return on your investment. Here are three ‘must-haves’. 1. Customisable workspace With a business intelligence application like IBM Planning Analytics, you can enjoy a single and consistent environment in which to manage your KPIs. So whether you need to measure business performance, evaluate and alter plans, expose gaps or test-drive the impact of potential scenarios on your business activity, you can do so in an interactive, ...

Despite the rampant growth of new data, constantly evolving technologies and the digitalisation of entire sectors, there are a few facets of business that will never be eliminated entirely: volatility, uncertainty and risk. But with business intelligence tools, you can keep your organisation on the right track and reduce the inherent risks of day-to-day operations. Here’s how. A complete, all-in-one business tool When seeking out a business intelligence tool to adopt in your organisation, you’ll want one with speed, agility and flexibility, so it provides a return on your investment. With IBM ...

The right business intelligence software can help companies beat out the competition and become market leaders in their industry. We reveal how to leverage three key benefits of business intelligence software - and overcome some potential drawbacks! 1. Integration across disparate business systems In order to derive the best strategic insights, you typically need to analyse data from across a number of different systems. Your company’s operational results, for example, require a financial perspective. That means your business intelligence solution should be able to integrate data from various ...

Picking the right business intelligence tools for your organisation is essential in the current era of big data. With information coming from all angles, it’s imperative to leverage the best software to make sense of your data and parse it into actionable, meaningful decision-making. Why do you need business intelligence tools? In their most basic form, business intelligence tools allow you to ‘see’ your data. This means you can watch how your data creates patterns and correlations. That information – including statistics and current trends – can then be used to formulate plans for the ...

In our hyper-connected business world, organisations are often siloed and sometimes spread across multiple locations. Combine that with the fact that the majority of employees are ‘hooked in’ to company-wide systems via their smart devices, and you have a raft of users able to access data and alter it. The problem? This often creates version-control issues that not only impact productivity and the effectiveness of your business intelligence (BI), but can harm your reputation and profitability. What is a ‘single version of the truth’? When discussing ‘truths’ in the form of BI, it’s important ...

This article talks about Business Intelligence and Business Analytics, things in common and about differences between one another. This blog also talks about the paybacks for an organization once these are adopted. Let’s start ... Though Business Intelligence and Business Analytics sound similar and are being used interchangeably by many, they do have differences. Business Intelligence ( BI ) :- Term Business Intelligence, though exist for long, have been used by wider audience from late 90s . Intelligence with in Business comes from the data being captured. Business Intelligence has been ...

There’s no question that more and more enterprises are employing analytics tools to help in their strategic business intelligence decisions. But there’s a problem - not all source data is of a high quality. Poor-quality data likely can’t be validated and labelled, and more importantly, organisations can’t derive any actionable, reliable insights from it. So how can you be confident your source data is not only accurate, but able to inform your business intelligence decisions? It starts with high-quality software. Finding the right software for business intelligence There are numerous business ...

Many businesses have already turned to Octane and partnered with us to help turn their data into meaningful insights. So if you've wanted to connect your Planning Analytics to Power BI, you're not alone and now with us you can. Octane has developed a way you can work directly with IBM Planning Analytics (powered by TM1) and Microsoft Power BI! We've had a number of clients who have wanted to integrate Planning Analytics and Power BI without using external proprietary software we at Octane can say that we've answered the market's call. Planning Analytics powered by TM1 is one of the worlds ...

Yesterday I was fortunate to attend an IBM partner day based on IBM Cloud Private for Data or ICPD and thought to write this blog for you who might not know what the platform is or does. This platform balances the individual data needs of your business by providing an integrated self-service, agile, enterprise-ready platform to significantly improve the governance around the collection, organisation, dissemination and analysis of your data but this isn't the best part. ICPD utilises modern microservices applications to enhance your data assets and analysis with machine learning (ML) and ...

Forward-thinking enterprises are using business intelligence and analytics to navigate through their digital transformation – one that could see them expand both physically and fiscally at a rapid pace. The ability to harness this data and use it to make business decisions, however, poses challenges. This is particularly true for organisations that haven’t previously had the technology nor the manpower to sift through all the historical data they’ve accumulated in their daily activities. Think about it – by 2020 it’s predicted there will be 5,200GB of data for every individual on the planet. ...

Business trip to Australia… the prospect itself is enough to make a dead man stand up and dance. More so as Swetha, Sasi & I were travelling to be in 2 of the worlds “best cities to live in. We visited Perth & Sydney; No..no 3 cities in fact, we transited via Melbourne airport. I know what you thinking, but it does count as we got to “check-in” Facebook... Haha, see SMART!! Before I start, very important to note the itinerary we were on as it boosted our flaunt status back in India! Why ?? Well it had so many check points and an envious schedule which had us touching 4 countries & ...

This Tuesday (25th Sep 2018) Octane Solutions proudly hosted a meeting for Senior Finance, IT Executives and Experts representing various companies and industries. The event was kicked-of by Mr. Amendra Pratap (MD, Octane Solutions) and Mr. Thomas Maddocks (ANZ Software Sales Leader - Commercial, IBM). This was followed by a solution demonstration conducted by Mr. Kevin Jessop (Lead FPM Solution Specialist, IBM) and a panel discussion. Thank you to all who attended our Executive Breakfast event; We were pleasantly overwhelmed with the response and excitement in the room. Redefining Planning ...

Welcome back, for those who had read Part A of this blog, hope you would have tested Parallel Interaction and benefitted from it. For those who haven’t, you can read it at http://blog.octanesolutions.com.au/caveat-around-concurrent-data-loads-part-a This blog builds upon the previous one and focusses on improving performance by Parallel Interaction, it highlights TM1 facets worth consideration while an object is locking. Synopsys Tips towards improvements around support for concurrent read/write and/or parallel execution of turbo integrator process enabling higher efficiencies and ...

If you haven't seen already the latest version of Cognos Analytics is now available for you to download. Luckily you won't need to read the about the latest changes. You can view this youtube clip which will explain what's new in it's reporting, dashboarding, stories and the portal for IBM Cognos Analytics 11.0.11. If you don't have the time some advanced features include using custom polygons and points for mapping. Also included is data caching in dashboards and stories, as well as support for Portal Pages, and controlling object visibility. To download the software you can find the ...

Most who are still on Cognos Business Intelligence software version 10.2.x would know that the software version was due End of Service this April 2018. It was quite dreading for existing users who had not planned an upgrade to Cognos Analytics (or C11 as it is called within IBM) just yet as it wasn’t really a straight forward version upgrade but a complete overhaul in the way you would interact with Cognos BI; more intuitive, user friendly and insightful but requires a bit of learning and a little more unlearning. GOOD NEWS!! IBM has just announced a new support option – Continuing Support ...

In this blog, let me explain you about one of the hidden/unused feature from IBM Cognos TM1. Before we start, let me ask you a question - Have you ever come across below requirements or related issues while working with TM1? Urgent requirement - Management needs new consolidation within a Canned report to meet their business needs. An Ad hoc requirement from business to get new consolidation member at the earliest. An alternative roll-up request from the Boss - for a better analysis using existing data. Stakeholders request to have additional consolidations which may be part of ad hoc ...

One of the major challenges of promoting code to successive instances is packaging the code for promotion and finding a slot for downtime. Not to mention the sequence of steps required to carry out the procedures and to communicate to one and all about the impending downtime. Adding to this difficulty is finding downtime when users are accessing the application from across the globe.So irrespective of deployment size, either major or minor, the deployment process is never going to be easy. However you can potentially overcome this using one of the TM1 Suite tools. To achieve this the ...

In this weeks blog, our team make it our duty to shine some light on right tool your company can choose to meet your business needs. We will cover the much discussed benefits of installing and using IBM's Planning Analytics workspace on Windows 2016. Contents What is PA and PAW PAW and Windows 2016 Benefits on PAW on Windows 2016 What is PA and PAW? Planning Analytics ("PA") is the next version, or can be considered as the next generation of TM1. IBM enhanced TM1 functionality and features and embraced new tools to its' suite. This new enhanced TM1 has been rebranded as PA. IBMs PA has the ...

Contents How to Create Dynamic Parameters for TM1 How to Build a Scorecard using TM1 Architect How to Enhance TM1 Security on a 'Need to Know' Basis How to Use Stargate Views for TM1 Cube Viewer How to Create Dynamic Parameters for TM1 The CheckFeedersMaximumCells is a dynamic parameter that allows users to restrict and control performing check feeders operation in a cube for a selected number of cells. As per the documentation, the default value is 3,000,000, meaning feeders for consolidation with up to 3 million intersections could be checked against, by default. Case in point: I’ve added ...

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. We've moved on from the times when cloud technology was an unknown territory for especially for Accounting and Finance but the industry players are now fully aware, prepared or in cloud. This leaves us ...

As a TM1 consultant, one of our challenging tasks is improving performance. Often dynamic subsets cause memory leakage and in turn affect performance. Let’s discuss, how to convert dynamic subset to static subset with an example. For Example, the “account1” dimension in SData instance has dynamic subset called “All Members”. Any operation done in the dynamic subset like delete/insert, will make subset has static. The below snippet of code to covert the dynamic subset to static (TI process can be downloaded in the bottom of the blog). Before running the above code After running the above code ...

Loss vs Gain? As we know – one thing that is constant is change and in the technology the change is always for the advancement from current and improvising the existing features. IBM has made significant changes to its Financial Performance Management product and has rebranded TM1 to IBM Planning Analytics. Rebranding TM1 to Planning Analytics does not mean you are going to lose existing tools like Architect, TM1Web, Perspective, Performance modular, Insight etc. IBM has enhanced the existing tools and improvised them. Few among many are listed below. The Cognos TM1 Web UX is totally ...

With today's increase in data volumes it is becoming more important to handle the high demand (either loading or accessing) of data conccurrently or in parallel. This blog will assist you by noting the benefits, enabling the functionality, as well as giving you an example. Let's start with the what parallel interaction / concurrency is and it benefits: It's a IBM server feature allowing concurrent operations (read/write). The concurrency operations can be performed on the same cube object. Writing to a cube will not lock it. This means that it will not wait for readers using the same cube to ...

I have been closely following and writing about trends in the business intelligence market over the past three years. During this time, I can’t say that we’ve seen any “radically new” trends, and I don’t expect any to emerge in the second half of 2017. What I have seen, so far in 2017, is the “evolution” of the dominant trends driving a dynamic BI market. The global business intelligence market is expected to reach USD 26.50 billion by 2021, growing at a CAGR of around 8.4% between 2016 and 2021 (Zion Market Research). Here are the 5 BI trends predicted to most influence the BI market in 2017 ...