Cognos Tm1 Vs GL wand reporting tool

[ravi]

Hi All,

Our business user are planning to replace the Tm1 with GL wand reporting tool. reason could be anything like tm1 cost and resource crunch etc.......
If tm1 usage is minimum for business needs, they want to switch to GL wand reporting tool, which they feel simple tool fit the current need.

Thought to check with forum can we compare Cognos Tm1 Vs GL wand reporting tool....?
Regards,

[stephen waters]

Ravi
Not one I have come across before and I don't have time for a detailed look at it. However, I have had a quick look at the 2 minute "60 second" youtube video and my comments are:
- It looks like simple formula based retrieval from underlying Oracle tables
- If it is a pure Excel add-in then unless there is any sort of clever caching, you will have lots of retrieving if you start paging through eg profit centres
- I guess any calculations which are not in Oracle Financials ( OF) ( eg sub totals, hierearchies, KPI's )will need to be set up in Excel. Eg look at the sub total on youtube. Potentially error prone.
- The drill through to transactions and sub ledgers looks very nice.

We have a customer using a tool called Mokum to do something similar. The problems they had were principally:
- speed: could be very, very slow pulling in even medium sized reports from OF, times of up to an hour not uncommon
- Spreadsheets ended up very large and complex because of the amount of Excel formulae needed to do reporting\analysis calculations
- They were left with all the issues ( maintenance, audit, reliability) of large Excel spreadsheets doing financial calcs
- Rigid, structured layout, cumbersome to change once set up.
- Unable to do flexible "slice and dice" type analysis

They have replaced Mokum with TM1 ( Cognos Express actually) and retro-fitted their existing Mokum based reports to TM1. Results, fast flexible reporting avoiding potential Excel errors.

If my assumptions are right then if you have all the calculations performed within OF, simple, structured report layouts, low data volumes and\or fast databases access times then GL Wand is likely to be Ok. Clearly it will not do proper, controlled modelling\planning as you can do in TM1.

WIthout knowing your requirements it is difficult to say which is better. nb. These comments are speculative, if anyone has better info please share it.

[jooste]

Hi Ravi/Stephen,

Please refer to our post here.

Conrad (from Excel4apps)

[echosun9]

Hi,

Just to add my observation (From user perspective) on above discussion since I have been work with both systems (TM1 & GL Wand).
- TM1 will add a new tab (Add-Ins) whenever you connect to TM1 server while GL Wand will keep (Add-Ins) tab in excel forever.
- TM1 and GL Wand will do an instant recalculation for all selected data (dimensions).
- TM1 is more flexible to change dimensions name/ titles (GL Wand will use a special format to have periods and other segments while user will be able to type a different dimension to get a different output. (Ex. in TM1: user can write Mar to get Mar sales for example while to do same in GL Wand he should write a glwand formula (Period_Name)).
- GL Wand snapshot is better because it will transfer all workbook into (value only), while TM1 snapshot will show one sheet only as (value).
- TM1 dimensions is too easy to sort/ filter/ modify....etc while in GL Wand it will be more strict and no (Subset editor) is available here.

If we have to rate from 1 to 10, I can give TM1 7 or 8 and GL Wand 5.