I use the solution in my company for our company's budgeting process; IBM Planning Analytics is used every year to manage different scenarios based on the needs of the users. The finance managers in our company use the product to change 90 percent of the budget processes and cash flows, along with some forecasting purposes.
The local authentication part is difficult to manage in the product, making it an area where improvements are required.
I have been using IBM Planning Analytics for six years. My company has a partnership with IBM.
The product's stability is good.
The scalability is very useful. Previously, in my company, we used IBM Cognos and IBM Accelerator, but presently, we use IBM Planning Analytics, which is a very useful tool compared with the past products we used.
I am satisfied with IBM's support. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.
The product is easy to deploy. The configuration of the authentication part with the tool is difficult. When I tried to integrate IBM Planning Analytics with LDAP, the configuration changed, so the config file changed. The integrations and certain syncs are sometimes difficult to match and authenticate.
The licensing part of the product is good. Every year, there is a need to renew the license. My company also uses multiple functionalities offered under IBM Cognos Analytics for ETL-related purposes. Compared to the regular licenses offered, the licensing model of IBM Planning Analytics is good. Compared with the other tools in the market, IBM Planning Analytics is a bit expensive.
The product has improved our company's forecasting accuracy since it serves as a very useful tool for our sales and controller teams as they easily get to enter the inputs using views in TM1, which gets loaded into our main database. If there are sales team members in different parts of the world, like in Hong Kong and Singapore, they may prefer to use IBM Planning Analytics, which is easy to use when compared to the Excel tool.
Speaking about planning analytics and data analysis, I would say that our company used to use IBM Cognos Analytics for reporting, where we used to use Cognos Dynamic Cubes so that users can easily use its drag and drop features while getting to see the data for which the users had to wait for two to three minutes prior to its use. In our company, tons of data are loaded into the memory, and users can use Cognos Dynamic Cubes to analyze data and understand it.
The AI capabilities of IBM have benefited our planning strategy as they are very useful for business. The tool allows the easy creation of dashboard reports using AI capabilities. No technical knowledge is required for business use cases.
It is possible to integrate the product in scenarios where some new integrations are available. I remember that my company used Azure Data Factory to connect Azure, Oracle, and IBM WebSphere Application Server.
When it comes to IBM Planning Analytics, it is complex to integrate it with LDAP and or any other authentication tool offered by Microsoft. In our company, some users like to integrate IBM Planning Analytics with the common LDAP or Microsoft AD, which we currently use for all our applications. The authentication part is difficult to configure with IBM Planning Analytics.
The maintenance of the product is easy. My company has scheduled maintenance on the product every week, especially during forecast times, so that memories automatically lapse and users can freely access their servers.
The use of the tool has had an impact on collaboration within our company's planning team since everyone knows how to easily access the data and publish the results.
I recommend the product to those who plan to use it.
I rate the tool a nine out of ten.