TM1 Forum

...
(i) Essbase
(ii) Business Objects
(iii) MicroStrategy

...? Now I realize the question has been asked many times before, but am curious to know if anything has changed with all the latest upgrades.

The context of this query: at a country level we have successfully implemented TM1 as a planning, analysis & reporting tool for Finance, including both Management Reporting and mult-GAAP Regulatory Reporting. The question is whether it can be rolled out on a global scale to other countries/jurisdictions as a standard (noting this applies to the banking & financial services industry).

As platforms such as Essbase, Business Objects and Micro Strategy are better known, TM1 doesn't generally get a look-in with technology seniors - so am wondering if there is a valid justification for choosing TM1 over these other applications.

If anyone has any thoughts or experiences they'd like to share, please fire away =)

Thanks!

Matt

TM1 is certainly mature enough to be considered for international deployment, and in fact is currently in use as the budgeting, planning, and reporting tool at one of the world's largest banks (300K+ employees), as well as in place at international pharmaceutical and investment banking firms. With IBM's backing and improving integration with Cognos and SPSS, it absolutely should be considered in this context.

If you want to PM me I can elaborate on the above.

fleaster wrote:but am curious to know if anything has changed with all the latest upgrades.

TM1 (and no doubt the other tools) continues to evolve but the underlying architecture and points of difference with other tools remain more or less the same in my view. Though to be honest I don't keep much track of the other tools, so I could well be wrong.

fleaster wrote:The context of this query: at a country level we have successfully implemented TM1 as a planning, analysis & reporting tool for Finance, including both Management Reporting and mult-GAAP Regulatory Reporting. The question is whether it can be rolled out on a global scale to other countries/jurisdictions as a standard (noting this applies to the banking & financial services industry).

I'd agree with Christopher, it's proven at an international level by several large firms.

fleaster wrote:TM1 doesn't generally get a look-in with technology seniors - so am wondering if there is a valid justification for choosing TM1 over these other applications.

In my experience, decisions on what to roll out to subsidiaries is pretty much "You get what we have because we are the parent company and you are the subsidiary". All of these tools are perfectly good and can be well implemented so 95% of the time the tool that gets rolled out comes down to which one is used by the boss. 5% of the time it's the one that's the most advanced.

However if you're looking to justify a decision that's already been made, then I'd stick with the comparisons that have already been made on the forum.

Martin

Christopher Kernahan wrote:TM1 is certainly mature enough to be considered for international deployment, and in fact is currently in use as the budgeting, planning, and reporting tool at one of the world's largest banks (300K+ employees), as well as in place at international pharmaceutical and investment banking firms. With IBM's backing and improving integration with Cognos and SPSS, it absolutely should be considered in this context.

If you want to PM me I can elaborate on the above.

Totally agree with CK. TM1 should not be underestimated in terms of international deployment. In fact some of the worlds largest engineering companies use TM1, as well as AIRBUS itself! And, as CK mentioned with the big brother (IBM) behind it, TM1 surely can stand amongst the "big boys".

Thanks all for the advice!

Martin Ryan wrote:In my experience, decisions on what to roll out to subsidiaries is pretty much "You get what we have because we are the parent company and you are the subsidiary". All of these tools are perfectly good and can be well implemented so 95% of the time the tool that gets rolled out comes down to which one is used by the boss. 5% of the time it's the one that's the most advanced.

Yes that's very true, and I think is probably what has happened in my case

My approach to date has been to say "this is what we can do with TM1 - whatever you implement needs to perform at the same level or better" ...the problem is I have not seen anything that can do the "or better" yet.

Now I'm open to new ideas, and am aware that "a system is only as good as its developer" (e.g. a well built SAP/BO platform can outperform a poorly built TM1), however, I'm still looking to understand what specifically makes TM1 unique vs its competitors or vice versa (e.g. you can do XYZ with TM1, but not with Essbase ...or you can do ABC with BO, but TM1 can't do this as well etc)

...anyway, maybe I should go put on my Google-Hat unless anyone has any other suggestions :p

Here's a few to get you started...
http://www.tm1forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1059 (BPC)
http://www.tm1forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=1194 (EP)
http://www.tm1forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3711 (BPC and PM10)
http://www.tm1forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=883 (BO)
http://www.tm1forum.com/viewtopic.php?p=3755 (Essbase)
http://www.tm1forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=4606 (Anaplan)
http://www.tm1forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3279 (Hyperion HFM)
http://www.tm1forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=9102 (BI and Microstrategy)

IMHO most of the threads on TM1 competitors have not been updated for a while.

The fact is IBM for all the wonderful work that they have done ( get the friggin doco right first ) have left the Engine untouched but what I find particularly disappointing is the Excel Addin , lack of Office Integration which has not changed for several years ( the icons have but nothing exciting or dramatic ).

SAP have moved leaps and bounds in this space with HANA and BPC but frankly what I can do with a few weeks of consulting work in TM1 often takes me months in BPC but since its mandated by HQ clients often toe this line but with HANA the equation is changing rapidly. Clients have still not bought into the HANA technology yet as its a disruptive technology but its only a matter of time the big boys act.

Lack of TM1 in the Cloud is hurting big time as well considering companies do run ERP's in the cloud these days.

Thanks all for the feedback...

nick_leeson wrote:..but what I find particularly disappointing is the Excel Addin , lack of Office Integration which has not changed for several years ( the icons have but nothing exciting or dramatic ).

By this I think you mean things like linking into Powerpoint, sending emails etc?

Personally, I've found TM1 has a few quirks and annoyances, but has proven versatile enough that you can always find a workaround. To me, the flexibility of the core Engine is the main factor - things like data visualization tools, mobility devices etc are secondary, and can always be partnered with Cognos addins etc

...so if we look past all the bells & whistles, how does the "engine under the hood" compare to SAP/Essbase/MicroStrategy/etc...? perhaps that is the more pertinent question

Matt

I work with Fleaster and one of the strategies our company has is to run as much of out IT from "Hubs" which as we've found with one of our BO environment can lead to significant performance issues (though not sure it this is more to do with it being a poorly built BO environment).

So as Fleaster said, we have our own local set up to the Server sits locally, how have those that have a user base in various geographic locations set up your environment?
Do you use a Hub? (i.e. Nth America, AsiaPac, Europe). Do you find any performance issues?

We have noticed that our users that try to connect to our local server from other countries have significant performance issues - 5mins just to log in is the norm...

I did work for a gigantasourous corporate conglomerate and the strategy was central corporate TM1 for submitting budgets, forecasts etc. from a central server. The user interface was originally Excel via Citrix but this was changed to TM1 Web for 95% of users with Citrix or TS maintained for the 5% of users who needed to do some additional reporting and analysis in Excel. We found that Web actually performed much better than Citrix, but this is also probably because a lot of work went into redesigning the input sheets and reports to be more efficient and work for the web.

There were also local TM1 installations where access was for local users via Excel. don't know if you would call this "hubs" or not, but probably. However this principle was that the 2 should not be mixed, if users chose to list local hub and central corporate admin hosts in Perspectives then it was at their own risk since Perspectives via WAN simply isn't workable from a performance perspective.

Been waiting for a solution for the WAN problem since I first started using TM1 in 2000. Still waiting. The only solutions are Citrix/TS for Excel Perspectives or using a web client.

My own personal opinion is for any global implementation one central server is the way to go. Sharing architecture standards and metadata over different instances is lets just say fraught and problems with server rep and sync are well noted. I would never touch rep and sync. And nowdays a 64 bit server can handle vast quantities of data, the core server is stable and locking is much much lesser an issue than it was (although not yet perfect). For a truly global application though managing data processing windows is always going to be problematic, there just aren't many windows when there are no users on the system.

As for the core engine, that has always been the product's saviour. I don't think anything else comes close. If only the backend tools and front end GUI were half as good.

Hi Lotsaram,

Thanks for the reply.

By "Hub" i mean having the physical TM1 Server located in say Singapore and having all of the Asian & Australian Users logged into that server via Perspectives - or more likely for us 1 gigantasourous server located in Nth America serving all Finance & Operations staff globally...

Though after reading your paragraph regarding WAN issues, this sounds like a possible recipe for disaster?

If you want everyone to use Perspectives then you will need Citrix. The other way to go, as Scott pointed out, is to use Web. You shouldn't try and use Perspectives, in the current incarnation, over a WAN, full stop. Regional servers or one server will depend on your set-up and requirements, but one is easier to maintain.

I don't think I've done a project in the last 10 years that didn't involve using Citrix for Perspectives. It's just not usable if everyone isn't on the same LAN segment as the TM1 server, either because they are geographically dispersed or you have VPN users. It's also way easier to control the Perspectives workstation image when everyone is running the same one with Citrix. With the way Citrix integrates with your desktop these days it's almost impossible to tell the difference between a Citrix Excel session and one running on your local machine too. In my book Citrix is a must-have for any TM1 project.

Hi,

I would be ineterested if anyone here has experience with HFM SmartView for Office performance over the WAN? Same as in TM1 or better?

Thanks
Matyas