TM1 versus PM10

[pchin]

Hi all,

I need some advice from users or developers who are familiar with both TM1 and PM10.

I work for a multinational hospitality group and we have been using Cognos EP (currently version 8.2) and Cognos ReportNet for over 10 years for our planning, reporting and analysis needs. A year ago a decision was taken (not mine) to replace Cognos EP with PM10. So far one application has been built on PM10 for Capital Budgeting. Although some design improvement were introduced such as workflow, multiple hierarchies and on-line reviewer comments, the back-end of the design is cumbersome as the data is maintained in 2 databases - OLAP for numeric and business rules and SQL for text and numeric discrepancies arise as a result in the reports which requires manual synchronisation. It appears that we are forcing the product to do something that it is not ready to handle seamlessly.

The next application built on PM10 was our monthly forecasting - it took a long time - 8 months although it was done totally by consultants who are supposed to be the exports. The application performance is slow and the lack of portability to/from Excel is an issue. With Cognos EP we are able to copy data from Excel into the cubes easily. This is important as users build spreadsheets with all the calculations and then copy the end result onto the cubes. In PM10 this is painfully slow as data takes 3-4 secs to register/refresh per row of data (12 columns). Export to Excel also works easily which is important for users to generate reports. Not so with PM10.

A week ago I saw a demo of TM1 and was blown away with its capabilities and the possibilities. Made me wished we had TM1 instead of PM10. It will be an expensive decision to switch and I need to get some objective advice from those who are intimately familiar with both products - not just the bell and whistles of each product but the ease of developing and maintaining applications.

All feedback welcomed / appreciated.

Thank you

[Duncan P]

Does PM stand for Performance Modeler? If not then I presume that it's a competing product from another company, and it would be useful to have more details. I can find nothing under that name in a web search.

If it is Performance Modeler then your system is running in TM1 already. Performance Modeler is a modeling front end that generates dimensions, cubes, rules and processes in TM1 to mimic what users could do in Cognos EP.

[Wim Gielis]

Hello Duncan, pchin,

PM10 is software by Infor. It's the successor of MPC. It's a multidimensional tool used for financial consolidation.
The company I work for, distributes and implements the software.
I am working with TM1 and have no special knowledge of the tool, but can refer you/other people to the correct persons in the organisation.
From what I understand: TM1 is much more flexible, but cannot compete (obviously) with the financial consolidation and related functionality (journals, ...) of the other tool.

[pchin]

Hello Duncan,

Wim is right, PM10 is an Infor product and I suspect PM stands for Performance Management. I am told it is a rebranding of several legacy products based on relational technology.

Wim, could you expand a little about the consolidation feature of PM10 and also your statement about journals? I have not seen this aspect of PM10 so far.

Thanks

[Wim Gielis]

Hello

I'm not sure about PM10 itself, never worked with the tool, neither with MPC. Maybe it would be best to consult the vendor's website or other channels to get correct information (to avoid making wrong statements here).

Do you need information on MPC/PM10 or on TM1, since you already have PM10 in the company?

[stephen waters]

I assume this is Infor PM10. Infor has a reputation for buying legacy products\companies and milking them for their existing customer revenue stream rather than investing in new product development.

I had a look at the Infor web site which is pretty vague about technology but, from what I know and what you are saying about relational I guess this is a combination of
- The old Comshare MPC product ( based on relational technology)
- The Alea database, developed by MIS then bought by Systems Union who were bought by Infor.
Infor used to position MPC for financial consolidation and Alea for budgeting but seem to have combined the 2 as an "integrated solution".

Alea was "very similar" to early versions of TM1; indeed I believe there was a court case between SinPer (who originally developed TM1) and MIS who were TM1 resellers at the time over the similarities. Alea was not as scaleable as TM1 and its performance was never as good. TM1 has been developed and enhanced massively in the last 10 years and I imagine will be much much better than anything Infor can currently offer. It has excellent integration with Excel and is very fast to develop applications.

We are working with several former CP customers and it is unfortunate you did not look at TM1 when you moved away from Cognos Planning. TM1 removes most of the limitations of CP (volumes, cube size restrictions etc), while significantly reducing processing time and maintenance effort. TM1 makes reporting and analysis much easier and more flexible, with excellent integration with Excel and Web . Quite frankly TM1 is so much better than CP in most functional areas I really can't see why any CP users would NOT move to TM1 !

If someone in your organisation has made a strategic decision to go Infor and you have already committed significant amount of money it will be difficult to change. However, maybe you could look at the next application you wish to migrate and get a head-to-head comparison between TM1 and Infor to compare functionality and build time. Engage with a local partner who really knows about TM1 and can show you the benefits, this will almost certainly be a legacy Applix partner with 10+ years of experience. There are several of these in most geographies.

[pchin]

Thanks Stephen, your feedback is most helpful.

Yes it will be painful to switch but it will be more painful to continue with the wrong product and keep throwing money at it to get consultants to build everything for us because it is too complex for us to handle it ourselves. In Cognos we built 100% of the applications on our own and only had some consultancy service in the beginning to get us started.