What the difference between Cognos TM1 & Cognos Planning?

[jahpil]

Hi all. I have hard time finding out the main differences between "Cognos TM1" and "Cognos Planning" ?

Both are mentionned as "collaborative planning, budgeting and forecasting solutions"...

Does someone know the difference ?

[Michel Zijlema]

Hi,

Have a look at this thread.

Michel

[Alan Kirk]

Hi all. I have hard time finding out the main differences between "Cognos TM1" and "Cognos Planning" ?

Both are mentionned as "collaborative planning, budgeting and forecasting solutions"...

Does someone know the difference ?

That's a tough one. If you believe the marketing 'droid presentations, Cognos Planning's (or actually Cognos BI in general's) function is to drive down a darkened road in a high performance sports car (with lots of focus on the red-illuminated tachometer), cutting to shots of astonishingly good looking businesspeople standing and nodding thoughtfully around a computer which is sitting on a large, polished wooden desk in a spacious office with panoramic windows in the background, cutting to shots of web dashboards with lots of brightly coloured dials and multicoloured maps.

In reality... I'm not wholly and entirely sure what Cognos Planning is, since the presentations and web sites resolutely refuse to cut the BS and get to the point. I know that it's an application, possibly a group of applications, which manages your budgeting or forecasting process (or "workflow"), regulates input and so on. It allows you to create presentations of the inputs. It allows you to apply business rules to the inputs. How much of this is "out of the box" and how much involves extensive work, I'm none too sure about. David Usherwood's post that Michel pointed to (posted after I started to write this, so I'll be covering a little of the same ground) will give a little more insight.

(Perhaps I've used slight hyperbole there. Sure, I know what Cognos Planning can do. (Something that could be explained about any software in half a page (if they dump the buzzword bingo, which is never a given) and a few screenshots.) However my interest immediately wanders to the question of how it works since that's what really tells you its strengths, weaknesses and how much work is going to be involved in using it. Seldom will you get that information up front.)

However I can tell you what TM1 is, how it could be used to do similar things prior to its acquisition by Cognos, and how it will most likely relate to Cognos Planning in the future.

It's basically a calculation engine. It's a client / server application. (Though one incarnation of it, Perspectives, can also run on the user's own desktop as a "local" session.) It's an application which lets your users input data, or lets you draw data from other systems. It stores that data, calculates some more data if you want, and lets you report on it either on an ad hoc basis or via fixed format reports that someone else has prepared for the users. Any data that is written to TM1 is immediately available to all users or, as the marketing 'droids would insist, it's "real time". It allows budgets to be created collaboratively, that is, by many users at the same time. It lets you budget from detailed lines to get a total, or to take a total and spread it down to the detailed lines. And it regulates who can do both the input and the output, and when.

So how does it do that?

Somewhere on your network you need a server machine. This can be a computer running either Windows Server or Unix.

That computer runs the TM1 Server program plus a couple of other support programs that I won't bore you with the details of. If you want your users to have access to TM1 data via a browser (OK, via Internet Explorer, the others don't work so well) you can also have the TM1 Web application running on that machine. (Or another machine on your network, but let's not overcomplicate things.)

The server program stores the data in cubes. Each cube is like a table in a database. For example, one cube might store data from the balances table in your General Ledger system. Tables are divided up into fields, with each field representing a particular characteristic of the data; say, the department, the product code, the date and so on. In a TM1 cube the equivalents of these fields are dimensions. Dimensions are made up of elements (such as the individual department codes, individual product codes and so on). Values are stored at the intersection of one element from each dimension. If you're not familiar with any of this, don't worry too much about it; all you need to know is that the TM1 server application stores the data, and the data lives in "cubes".

The TM1 server program doesn't only store data, it can also calculate data. These calculations can be simple consolidations (like having Month elements which add up the individual Weeks in your time dimension) or they can be more complex ones based on data that exists in one or more cubes and some built-in mathematical functions. For example, your sales department might put their sales values in one cube, the production sites might put a production ratecard in another cube, and a third cube might calculate your production costs by pulling the values from the two input cubes and performing calculations on them. Such calculations are called "Rules". They have their own syntax, but if you know how to write Excel formulas reasonably well, you can learn how to write rules.

An important point about the cubes; unlike a lot of planning tools, TM1 stores the cubes in the memory of the server machine. It calculates rules-based or consolidation values only when it needs to, and once calculated those values also stay in memory unless someone changes the inputs. If that happens, TM1 recalculates the results when required. This makes it much, much faster than applications which need to read values from the hard disk of the computer that they're running on, but does mean that you need a server machine with a lot of memory.

So that's the server side; the calculation engine that I was talking about.

On the client side, there are multiple ways of getting at that data.

The original and most common is via an Excel add-in; a workbook file with the extension of .xla, which contains program code which extends the functionality of Excel. In this case the add-in allows Excel to communicate with the TM1 Server.

There's a GUI interface (a window that you can open from an Excel menu) called Server Explorer. This allows the user to browse the data in the cube. Ever done a pivot table in Excel? Server Explorer's Cube Viewer works on a similar principle. You have "tiles" representing each dimension. Each tile can be either in the title area (the "page" area in a pivot table), a row area or a column area. You can select only one element from the dimensions which are in the Title area, but each selected element for dimensions in the rows and columns area will appear in a separate row or column, as the case may be. This is called creating a View of the data.

However, and here's one of TM1's strengths, you can also "slice" the view into Excel worksheets. This creates "live" reports via special worksheet functions called DBRW formulas. You can save the workbook, open it up next month, connect to the TM1 server, press [F9] and the report will be refreshed with the most up to date figures. Or, you can change some of the parameters of the report (say, the month) and press [F9], and get the figures for the current month. You can format these workbooks using all of the usual Excel formatting capabilities, as well as having other normal Excel functions (like Sum, SumIf, VLookup etc) in the worksheet as well. That's how it's possible for users who don't know anything about TM1 (and little enough about Excel) to use it. If someone with the necessary skills creates a report workbook using TM1 formulas, an end user doesn't need to know anything more than "you open the workbook, you connect to the TM1, you select your elements, you press [F9], you have your results".

The other powerful feature is writeback capability, used in budgeting and forecasting. If the report is set up correctly you can punch a number into one of the cells and instead of overwriting the formula (as would happen with a normal Excel worksheet function), that value will immediately be written back to the TM1 server and the formula will be left in place showing the new value. There are also data spreading features which allow you to (say) spread a single amount across all of the weeks of a budgeting period.

Input can, of course, also be done via Cube Viewer.

Another application which allows you to work with TM1 data is called, slightly misleadingly, Architect. It runs on the client computer and is like Server Explorer / Cube Viewer, but without the need to use Excel. I'd suggest that relatively few TM1 users use it.

TM1 Web is the other way to interact with TM1. Note that this is typically deployed within a company intranet, rather than being directly exposed to the Web itself. (In our case, you need to log in to a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to get to TM1 Web, but that's getting beyond the scope of your question.)

TM1 Web is like a hybrid of the two main methods above. It has a Server Explorer-like method of creating ad hoc queries, but it also allows Excel sheets to be "published" to HTML. Those sheets (called Websheets) aren't actually Excel sheets, but rather an HTML representation of them. They don't support, for example, VBA code, though there are "Action Buttons" which allow a range of automated activities to be performed. Graphic support is also fairly rudimentary, so don't expect to be able to effectively do the sort of pretty dashboarding that you'll see in a Cognos BI presentation on a Websheet.

Web is, however, low footprint (it doesn't require any extra components to be added into your browser) and can be useful if you have users who are widely distributed. Another alternative is to give those users an Excel interface via Terminal Services or Citrix. (That is, where the Excel session runs on a computer in the main office, and only the input commands and the screen display effectively have to be sent between the users and that computer. This cuts down on the amount of data traffic flowing up and down the pipe to the remote users, and improves speed.)

TM1 supports security which allows users to have read, write or no access to individual cubes, dimensions, elements within dimensions, and even individual cells. What that means is that if you have, say, a Version dimension consisting of the elements Actuals and Budget, the users may have read only access to Actuals all the year round (since those values will typically be sourced from an external system, and shouldn't be changed by users), but write access to Budget for a specified period of the year. The TM1 Administrator can change that to Read access once the budget input period is over, or can even make it read only for most users except for a group of reviewers who can still make changes to the budget prior to final sign-off. Using methods like these, TM1 also function as a stand-alone planning tool.

The TurboIntegrator (TI) that you'll see referred to in David's post is an Extraction, Translation and Loading (ETL) tool which allows you to create "scripts" for handling TM1 data. For example, loading it into a cube from external sources (such as a relational database, or a text file), or moving it between cubes, or updating it in some way. Again, if you know a little Visual Basic, you can learn TI.

But to return to the original point (or the second one, after "Marketing 'droids should not be allowed to do software presentations unless they know something about the software and also how to get to the point occasionally"), none of this is "out of the box". Everything, from the design and building of the cubes, to the writing of the rules, to the creating of Excel reports or Websheets, to writing TI scripts is something that you have to create from scratch, or hire someone to do for you. (Although some consultancies offer easy to deploy add-on tools which can help with this.) Fortunately TM1 is a pretty easy tool for anyone who has good Excel (including some VBA) knowledge to come to terms with, which is why it started out life in many companies in the Finance department.

I would imagine that Cognos Planning provides a wider range of tools to help you with the planning process, and workflow features that you don't need to put as much manual effort into to create a budget or forecast process. And as David's post indicates, TM1 can be used as a "back end" to store data which originated in Cognos Planning.

And that is indeed understood to be the future of TM1. While it is supposed to continue to be available as a standalone product, my understanding (based on user group presentations) is that it will in due course be tightly integrated with Cognos BI. TM1 will serve as the back end data store so that its in-memory processing speed will combine with Cognos BI (including Planning) features which allow you to use Cognos Planning to create your workflow and input / output interface.

[jahpil]

Thank you all on your valuable inputs ! Now I understand why I had difficulties understanding the differences between these 2 systems which provide almost the same kind of capabilities.

The real question now is to know where Cognos is going to ? Integrating TM1 within Cognos Planning ? Or leaving it as a stand-alone module ?
I think we are in the same situation with Analysis Studio and PowerPlay ....

Cordially.

[David Usherwood]

Both. (Of course)
TM1 will remain a standalone product. It is also being moved into Enterprise Planning to be the storage and calculation engine of that offering.

[mce]

I found this http://forums.olapforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2969 post also useful about this topic.