Business Analytics:
Financial and business managers today are seeking business analytics at a higher level of ability to manage business performance than ever before. They are looking for ways to view and analyze data from tracking fluctuations in revenues and expenses, to following customer trends and uncovering hidden cost drivers, to making changes based on developments such as economic variations or competitors' strategic shifts. Business intelligence analytics of these kinds of analyses often lie beyond the reach of most of today's ERP systems.
Specifically, let us consider SAP solutions because of its pervasiveness. Critical information is available within SAP Business Warehouse (BW) and R/3, which serve as a central reporting engine, but are not readily accessible for the sophisticated analysis many need --nor at the response levels they may need.
Fortunately these tasks can be easily accomplished with Applix's TM1, the analytics, planning, budgeting, forecasting and reporting application that complements the transactional operations performed by ERP and legacy systems. You can leverage your existing investment because TM1 has the ability to access the data from SAP and any other ERP or external systems and organize complex business information to enable you to perform real-time what-if analytics. You are then empowered to consider future scenarios in addition to evaluating your current and past performance.
TM1 also consolidates information from disparate systems. It allows you to load in corporate and source data for analysis during key business cycles --without negatively impacting response levels. Applix TM1 offers business performance management solutions that enable you to couple your analytics with planning, budgeting, forecasting, and reporting for optimum business performance management.
You then have business requirements analysis with a proven approach that complements and enhances your ERP systems, saving time and expense for multiple teams across your enterprise.
To help you understand how TM1 supports and enhances ERP and legacy systems, this paper provides a basic technical overview of how TM1 works with SAP, followed by three brief case studies to illustrate the complementary nature of TM1.
How TM1 Complements SAP With Business Analytics Solutions:
TM1 is rated the top solution for business analytics software benefits achieved. You've invested significant time and money into your ERP systems and maybe you have then moved that data into a data warehouse. Business users now have access to that data for analysis, but can they get the information in the time frame they need and are they able to do the type of budgeting, forecasting, planning and reporting required to help make timely and advantageous business decisions.
TM1's capabilities allow customers to quickly and easily implement applications that allow them to meet their business goals and reap the benefits of better and more efficient processes. TM1 offers a number of features to complement SAP, freeing up your critical data to be actionable information.
- Fast Query Response Times TM1's memory-based multi-dimensional cube architecture means excellent response times: TM1 has been rated as the best solution for both query times and dataload/calculation times according to The OLAP Survey 52. With multiple memory- based cubes, data is more rapidly searched, modified, and restructured than with a single cube disc-based structure.
- Business Modeling With SAP BW providing the critical business information, TM1 enables users to quickly build powerful models of their business. Using the data stored in BW, finance and business users alike can quickly build models for tasks such as planning, what-if analysis, and risk assessment. By basing these models on actual data, businesses can perform much more accurate analysis.
- Fastest Implementation TM1 implements rapidly: For the third year in a row, respondents to The OLAP Survey 5 reported that TM1 had the fastest implementation time of all products with more than 67% of projects live within 3 months 62% more sites implemented than Cognos PowerPlay, 161% more than Hyperion's Essbase. Faster implementation means you achieve business results more quickly and thoroughly.
- Flexible Data Analysis You will gain greater flexibility in data analysis. Your users themselves can quickly build dynamic, multi-dimensional models (applications) with little training and no IT assistance. You can address one planning or reporting need and then quickly build more operational and financial applications over time. Countless Applix TM1 implementations with more than 2200 customers have demonstrated its flexibility in modeling companies' unique business structures, products, periods, cost centers or any other "dimensions."
