Tag Archive for: IBM Cognos TM1

Ironside recently reported a new issue to IBM that is now confirmed as having an impact on all TM1 sites regardless of version. The Ironside Managed Services team uncovered the issue while troubleshooting a client’s environment.

“In our efforts to secure an environment for one of our larger insurance clients, it was noticed that the SSL certificate was going to expire shortly,” said Erik Romanek, Ironside’s Director of Platform and Managed Services. “John Commons, one of Ironside’s platform consultants, worked with IBM to come up with a few solution options. This is just another example of Ironside going the extra mile to make sure the implementations we work on are configured securely and for longevity.” Read more

To a TM1 developer, alternate hierarchies are sometimes synonymous with ragged hierarchies. When designing cubes for Cognos BI, it’s important to remember that they are structurally different concepts. How you model them in TM1 will affect your Cognos BI reports. Continuing where we left off last month, we will discuss some best practices for handling these hierarchy structures in a Cognos BI context.

Note: As of TM1 10.2, alternate hierarchies cannot be defined separately in the }HierarchyProperties cube. Read more

Workforce Planning

On October 21st, Ironside hosted Robust Workforce Planning Enablement with IBM Cognos TM1 Webinar, where Ironside’s TM1  experts discussed the challenges and options for cube design and conducted a live demonstration of Ironside’s TM1 workforce planning solution.

Ironside’s planning solutions offer greater capabilities and flexibility than packaged cloud solutions or when compared against other enterprise planning offerings. Read more

Employee compensation accounts for most of the expense base for service-oriented companies. The true ‘driver’ for this expense revolves around workforce planning. Creating a projection that matches the size of the workforce to the demands of the business can be a difficult exercise. Like most complex tasks, breaking it down into manageable components makes it easier to implement. This is the core principle behind driver-based compensation planning. Read more

There is a plethora of content available on utilizing the various TM1 functions, but what happens when these functions do not work as expected? What do you do when a rule does not return the expected value, a TI process does not load the values you had hoped for, or a cube’s performance is below acceptable levels? This article will cover some techniques for debugging TM1 that you can use to resolve issues with rules, TI processes, and cube performance. Read more

There are various approaches available to enhance the performance of your TM1 application. One such approach is to leverage Stargate Views.

Stargate Views are different from traditional view objects and represent cached subsections of cubes that get created through user experience. As users browse cubes via the Cube Viewer or consume cube data via Cognos BI reports and analyses, these subsections get stored according to the current title elements/context and row and column subsets being requested. Read more

At first glance, IBM Cognos TM1 and Cognos Planning have similar features. They both leverage a multicube architecture and support complex, cross-cube calculations.

The primary differentiating feature of IBM Cognos TM1 can be found in its efficient calculation engine and its method for storing data. When users enter data into most other planning applications, a read/write procedure is performed to reflect the change in a database stored on a hard disk. In contrast, IBM Cognos TM1 calculations and data storage happens in memory/RAM. This allows entered data to be immediately updated within the cube and retrieved. As a result, data is available real-time, which greatly enhances both the performance of queries and ability to perform what-if analytics. Read more

On September 10th, IBM announced the release of Cognos TM1 10.2. This release contains a substantial amount of enhancements and bug fixes, which further integrate Cognos TM1 with Cognos Business Intelligence and provide better performance when planning and forecasting. One major focus area was enhancing IBM Cognos TM1 10.2 Performance Modeler. Read more

The Ironside Group and IBM are hosting a series of complimentary Lunch N’ Learn’s where we will discuss benefits that our customers are experiencing with Integrating Budgeting, Reporting, Consolidation and Forecasting using IBM Business Analytics Solutions. Read more

Inter-cube Feeders

In my previous month’s article on “Managing the Art of Feeders”, we reviewed the concept of using Skipcheck and Feeder functionality in standard TM1 rules. In this month’s article, we will discuss further enhancing a developer’s capability around writing rules within TM1 and review the concept of inter-cube feeders. While much of the functionality and capability found within TM1 rules is necessary to provide the desired end user result set, that does not mean that a developer should simple assume that all functionality is created equal. Inter-cube feeders, while often necessary, can have a significant impact on overall performance which should be taken into consideration before inclusion in a rule. Read more