If your business uses IBM Planning Analytics (formerly TM1) for financial reporting or modeling, documenting changes to analytics assets throughout their lifecycles will increase effectiveness.
If a crisis happens, the last thing you’d want is to lose critical information, such as operational and institutional knowledge, leaving you ill-prepared to address pressing business needs.
That’s why you need powerful tools, like QUBEdocs, to get the most out of Planning Analytics.
To determine which IBM Planning Analytics data requires documentation, you need to identify the most pertinent data to address your business needs. Specifically, any data pertinent to past and current financial records, and future projections based on these, needs to be documented.
Essential data to document when configuring IBM Planning Analytics data include:
There are multiple data points to track within IBM Planning Analytics, which differ depending on your mission-specific needs, customers, regulatory compliance considerations, or industry.
The data above serves as a great starting point for streamlined TM1 documentation.
These categories of data likely drive the essential functions of your IBM Planning Analytics application and will help maintain business continuity and operational effectiveness at the enterprise level.
IBM Planning Analytics can be a challenging platform for end-users, even with its fast, scalable, and dynamic business analytics solutions. But tracking data via TM1’s cube system will allow your business to transform its analytics capabilities, make the best use of data, and meet customers' needs faster—especially with the help of QUBEdocs’ Planning Analytics tools.
Documenting IBM Planning Analytics model lifecycles offers several benefits, including:
However, it all comes down to your business-specific needs or TM1 applications.
Let’s break down some ways data documentation can enhance your business analytics and optimize decision-making capabilities, helping you get the most out of the TM1 architecture.
As your business expands and priorities change, you will need to document changes to critical IBM Planning Analytics processes to minimize risks associated with these changes.
The most important data to document when it comes to change management includes:
It is essential to document changes as they happen—but it's overly cumbersome to continually make retroactive changes just to bring your IBM Planning Analytics applications up-to-date.
The complexity of IBM Planning Analytics can be simplified by documenting all standardized processes across your enterprise systems. By documenting changes to the IBM Planning Analytics machinery, you help end-users navigate the analytics tools and improve their productivity. Processes can also be tracked according to specific user groups and functions.
When standardizing IBM Planning Analytics processes and streamlining administration, you should prioritize documenting the following:
Poor documentation of system-wide changes to core Planning Analytics functions can further complicate data modeling and potentially compromise downstream operational integrity.
\
Collecting the most relevant data about your specific IBM Planning Analytics implementation will guide the enterprise-wide administration and rollout of analytics tools and help improve overall business intelligence.
As you scale up your organization and build new departments, you will likely need to converge all the disparate information (within and outside of individual departments) into a meaningful knowledge base.
To get the most out of IBM Planning Analytics, it helps to determine which data—if collected—will simplify the broader use of the analytics platform and improve overall efficiency.
Ongoing documentation of each TM1 model in use will support CFOs’ priorities, such as:
Regardless of the activities, processes, or business roles supported by IBM Planning Analytics, data documentation is critical to reducing data disparities across departments and simplifying business analytics.
After identifying which data to track within your model, the next step in effective IBM Planning Analytics data management is to develop a documentation system.
When it comes to tracking data in TM1, you need a robust and resilient documentation system that can consistently support data documentation during organizational changes. Building a documentation framework can help enhance the speed and efficiency of model development, mitigating risks related to data loss or compromised model integrity.
To get the most out of your IBM Planning Analytics management, here are some features to include in a documentation framework:
The most important aspect of data documentation with IBM Planning Analytics is ensuring that changes to financial models are not lost within the noise of a dynamic business environment.
Automated data documentation, greater visibility of TM1 data models, and simpler visualizations of data environments will accelerate your data modeling. As a result, your finance team will generate data models faster and more efficiently—without worrying about backend documentation processes.
Looking to achieve all the above with a single, powerful tool?
Trusting QUBEdocs with your data documentation needs will help you streamline your IBM Business Analytics workflows. Our team of IBM TM1 experts will help enhance your TM1 model development, meet compliance with regulatory frameworks such as SOX, and enable robust data modeling across business departments and functions.
QUBEdocs model visual mapping feature allows you to see all processes, rule flows, and more.
Ask our expert team about some of QUBEdocs key features:
Furthermore, our documentation engine will automate model documentation and maintain the integrity of your analytics models, helping you generate clean data to serve your customers more efficiently. Let us know how we can help– request a consultation below and we'll set up a brief phone call to see how we can make your models more efficient.
Sources:
IBM. IBM Planning Analytics. https://www.ibm.com/products/planning-analytics