Written by Mike Bernaiche, July 29th 2022
Recently, I had the opportunity to see what was coming in Planning Analytics Applications and Plans and received the approval to share some of what I experienced. Actually, the first section is now available in Planning Analytics version 78 released July 13, 2022. Those of you using Planning Analytics Applications and Plans will find these improvements much needed and exciting. Those of you waiting for a similar experience to contributor applications in the older versions of TM1 will be excited to upgrade and have similar functionality. Let’s get started!
Approval and Rejections of Submissions
Approvals and Rejections are now available in the planning process with version 78 released on July 13, 2022. In addition, improvements to email notifications and the overall submission process make it easier to work with plans. When you create a plan, you can now add approvers for each contribution. These approvers can approve or reject the submissions.
Also in version 78, enhancements have been made to email notifications. Event triggered emails are now sent to relevant users in a plan when any of the following occur.
Examples of email notifications.
You also have a new area to track submission and rejections with a logging screen. Great for the plan admin to track progress and understand where each step of the plan is at.
Before I talk about future enhancements, please note that these are in the IBM roadmap and their release is planned for future updates. There is no timetable for release, and I will update this blog based on their release version when available.
Monitoring the Plan
Plan owners will now have visibility to all information in a plan through a monitoring screen.
Task Dependencies
For plan owners to put in place task dependencies for automatic task to open and close based dependent tasks.
Plan and Unlock
Plan owners will be able to lock and unlock contributed data allowing for a more contributor like experience in Planning Analytics Applications and Plans. Once the plan submission is complete and approved, lock it, and ensure that data doesn’t change.
Schedule Plan Open and Close
You will be able to open and close plans based on pre-set dates based on your planning cycle. Create your schedule, set it and forget it.
Detailed Instructions with Attachments
Plan owners will be able to add detailed instructions with attachments to the plan to give guidance and detailed instructions to plan contributors. Load your .pdfs to make the process more efficient and get rid of the back and forth on instructions.
Visual Workflow Authoring
To give clarity into the flow of the planning process you will be able to create a visual workflow of the planning process. Use this to make it easier for end users to understand the flow of data.
Summary of What's Coming Soon in Planning Analytics Applications and Plans
As you can read there are several excellent enhancements coming to Planning Analytics Applications and Plans in the coming months. Approval and rejection along with email enhancements are included in version 78 released on July 13, 2022. The rest of the enhancements are coming soon, and this is a great opportunity to start planning your upgrade to utilize these great features. We wrote a blog discussing upgrades and an exciting new bundle program for upgrades. You can read all about it here, Solving the IBM Cognos Upgrade Challenge - Lodestar Solutions. You can always reach out to us at services@lodestarsolutions.com.
I hope you find these enhancements as exciting as I do. Some of our clients have been asking for these for many months and I’m excited for IBM to release all of the updates to Planning Analytics Applications and Plans.