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5 November 2026, 11:29:59 am AEDT
7 min
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5 November 2026, 11:29:59 am AEDT
7 min
Executive Summary
Key Takeaway in 30 Seconds
Themes from the customer panel at our Sydney TM1 User Group, from proving value to the CFO to where AI fits in finance.
Themes from the customer panel at our Sydney TM1 User Group, from proving value to the CFO to where AI fits in finance.
By Amendra Pratap, Founder and Managing Director, Octane | October 2026
The part of any user group I look forward to most is the panel. Only the people running a platform every day can tell you what it’s really like. At our Sydney TM1 User Group on 21 October, four TM1 users shared their experience openly, then took questions from the room.
Our panellists were Adam Buckle from WiseTech Global, Yenny Dewi from Sanofi, Isabella Susilowati from Lighthouse Analytix, and Matt Clifford from News Corp. Between them they bring decades of TM1 experience across logistics technology, pharmaceuticals, automotive services, media and banking regulation. Adam and Yenny have both used TM1 since around 2000.
Different journeys, a familiar starting point
Each panellist came to TM1 by a different route. What surprised me was how many of those journeys started the same way. Three of the four described organisations where TM1 began life as little more than a data warehouse, a place to load data and pull it back out. Useful, but only a fraction of what it can do.
From there, the stories diverged. At WiseTech, TM1 replaced a single consolidation spreadsheet and has grown with the business ever since. At Sanofi, dozens of local instances became one global model. At News Corp, the team is redesigning its models to reflect a business shifting from print to digital.
Theme one: TM1 is the constant through change
A thread ran through every story. Businesses change around TM1, and TM1 keeps going. WiseTech swapped its core finance system for Microsoft Dynamics 365 and absorbed major acquisitions while TM1 kept the reporting, consolidation and planning running. News Corp is buying digital businesses that want to be measured in very different ways, and is restructuring its models so finance can track the core drivers across all of them.
Several panellists made the same point about speed. When an opportunity or a shock arrives, the business needs analysis quickly. Isabella described how, during COVID, her team met before 7am every day to decide which branches to open and how many staff to roster, using numbers from TM1. With supply chains under pressure again today, that ability to respond fast matters as much as ever.
Theme two: value comes from people and process, not the tool
When I asked how they prove TM1’s value to leadership, nobody started with features. Yenny looks at efficiency, planning quality and adoption, and adoption matters most. If people keep running shadow spreadsheets alongside TM1, the value never arrives. Sanofi runs a governance board that weighs every enhancement request on business impact, and it handles a steady stream of them.
Adam was blunt. It’s rarely the tool that’s the problem. You have to get your people and process right, and keep proving the value, because people will always chase the shiny new thing. Isabella’s advice for anyone trying to win over a CFO was to start small. Pick one problem, build a prototype and show the time saved before asking for more.
Theme three: finance should be looking forward
Matt pushed the conversation beyond efficiency. In his CFO conversations, the bigger prize is getting finance into the room when decisions are made, with the right information at hand. News Corp recently mapped 30 integrated finance systems and chose TM1 as one of the platforms to build around.
Isabella and Yenny built on this. Isabella talked about using TM1 to surface risks before they hit, such as revenue tied to contracts about to expire. Yenny explained that Sanofi’s risks and opportunities now sit in TM1 rather than in slide decks, so leaders can pull them up during the meeting. She also showed how integrated planning links supply chain volumes to the financial plan, so both sides work from the same numbers.
Where AI fits
Naturally, the conversation turned to AI. Adam made the point that got the most nods. Point an AI model at a spreadsheet and you get different answers at different times. TM1 holds the business logic, so AI built on top of it gives consistent, repeatable results.
Yenny shared how Sanofi has used machine learning for forecasting since before COVID, running forecasts untouched only where demand is stable. Matt described a powerful but sobering example of an AI agent that got the numbers right and the conclusions wrong. The shared view was that AI will speed up the work, but finance still needs to understand the business, test the output and pick real problems to solve rather than automating what it already does well.
Questions from the floor
The audience had plenty to ask. One attendee, midway through her own Dynamics 365 rollout, asked how WiseTech kept TM1 reporting intact through its ERP change. Adam’s answer was to connect through the REST API and keep the existing reporting objects, and the two carried on the conversation over lunch.
Another attendee asked which AI platforms each company uses. The answer was telling. Most use several. Matt said News Corp tracks almost 200 AI tools across the organisation and avoids depending on any single model. Adam compared it to choosing streaming services, and the panel agreed that the cost of AI is now a real factor in those choices.
What I took away
Every story on the panel came back to the same idea. TM1 can already do far more than most of us ask of it. The organisations getting the most from it start small, govern it well and keep improving, and that same discipline is what will make AI work in finance.
Thank you to Adam, Yenny, Isabella and Matt for their honesty, to everyone who asked questions, and to IBM for hosting us. If you’d like to talk about getting more out of your own TM1, reach out to me on LinkedIn or visit octanesolutions.com.au.
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Written by
Amendra Pratap
Amendra has a background in accounting and systems implementation. He has led teams and implemented BI tools like Canon, Vodafone and Macquarie. Amendra resigned from Macquarie after 8 years there in 2016 to start up Octane which is now a IBM Gold partner and provides consulting and deployment of IBM applications to clients globally.
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