How can I make more money with TM1 skills? Learning Cognos TM1 on-the-job can give you the opportunity to advance your career and compensation, while you are already putting in the time pulling in a salary. The ever-growing buzz topic is “Big Data”. Companies everywhere are all about Big Data. I want it, I got it, now what do I do with it? It’s simple enough to figure out whether you made money or not. It’s the why or why not that needs to be figured out. From your results, you need to figure out the data correlations of what is driving your business. Then, you need to design a driver-based way for your operations people to plan and plot out the how and how not to, in order to best move forward to increasing the bottom line.
Business Analytics (BA)
- “Big Data”
- Measureable Results
- Data correlations
- Driver-Based Decisions & Forecasting
Ever evolving software
- Starts off complicated and used by large corporations
- Moves to broader user understanding and more affordable licensing structure
- Increased adoption rate
- Becomes a standard tool for business
Over 25 years ago Excel (and even further back – Lotus 1-2-3) was a glorified calculator program used at work. Now, it appears that you can’t start your day without it up and running, and that’s before you even leave for work! Planning a picnic? Let me figure out what I need per person and as the RSVPs roll in, I will pop in the number showing up and it will spit out my shopping list. As great and flexible as Excel is, the data sets just keep growing. And, it seems that even though Excel went from 65,000 rows to 1,000,000 (more than 10x the capacity), you started to quickly hit the ceiling of that millionth row because you had been asked to analyze even more data.
Excel is now becoming a compliment to BA software
- Hitting the data capacity of Excel
- Need for more collaboration between departments and divisions
- Need for global, web-based programs
- Version control
- Rapid deployment
Data sets are ever increasing and maxing-out what you can enter and work with in Excel. With driver-based planning, you need to have the input of Department A in order to calculate the output of Department B. With web-based programs, you can have many users working at the same time and get real or near real-time consolidating capabilities. BA software can maintain version control. How many times has it come up that the wrong Excel file was being used (as in, “Oh I should be using the May 5th V4 file, my bad”). And finally, you maintain your model in one place and don’t have to modify 50+ spreadsheets because the business logic changed.
Fish or Go Fish
- Makes you more valuable
- Makes you more marketable
- You may actually like it
- If you don’t, Bob will…
Now, we all know that change and learning new things can be exciting, frightening and not always occurring when you have the time to prepare. The role of the Financial Analyst is an ever-evolving role and that is why many of you have chosen this position to begin with. Otherwise, you would be in Accounting and making the same entries every month, but with different amounts. The quicker you are able to collect and calculate data into actionable reports, the better your business can make decisions for the future, instead of looking in the rear-view mirror and looking at snapshots of what the business did a month or two ago. Cognos TM1 provides you the database and consolidation engine to collect and calculate vast amounts of data at multi-dimensional pinpoints and has the Excel integration to improve and expedite ad-hoc reporting. Learning, implementing, and growing the capacity of Cognos TM1 will put tangible experience on your resume that employers are looking for. Sure an MBA is great, but without experience with it, that says “I was able to do XYZ only because I have an MBA”. You’ve put in time and put out money that you are hoping to get a return on in the future. So, like we said in the very beginning, learning Cognos TM1 on-the-job can give you the opportunity to advance your career and compensation, while you are already putting in the time and pulling in a salary.