Insights

Planning Analytics Workspace (PAW) will be the new face of IBM's legendary TM1 planning and analysis platform. The main functionalities are a rich interactive user interface, an easy synchronization and data discovery interface. PAW is not merely an upgrade of the exisiting TM1, but something completely different and fresh in terms of the visual user interface and functionalities. When you have plenty of business users, PAW can be considered as a real option, not only for the visual make-over but also for the quicker reporting and analysis platform. It will make the life of the business analyst significantly easier.

Over the years Power BI evolved a lot and with this originated several ways of working with it. There are different license models, free and paying. Next to a desktop version there is also a cloud version and recently Microsoft released an on-premise server version. How do you start and what license do you need? In the cloud, or on-premise? In this insight, we will try to explain the different flavours of Power BI.

Qlik can be considered as an "all-in-one" data warehousing solution and reporting tool that is flexible. In this insight, we will demonstrate that Qlik has a solid data model that can be used for both guided analytics and data discovery. In that sense Qlik possesses all features and requirements for a classic data warehouse.

The object of this insight is to answer the following question: "What makes switching to IBM Planning Analytics for excel worthwhile, and will it cover for the functionality already available through TM1 perspectives?". To answer that question we will describe the (new) functionality of PAX and emphasis the differences with TM1 perspectives.

With this insight, we target to describe the additional functionality and reporting possibilities that you can bring to your Cognos Controller consolidation platform by activating the Cognos TM1 FAP (Financial Analytic Publisher) solution. Moreover, we will share some of our element61 best practises for maximizing the ease of use of this ‘add-on’.

Globalisation is forcing companies to re-think the organisational structure and to develop new competences in-house. These pressures are resulting in more and more companies being confronted with consolidation issues. Properly kicking off your consolidation process, allows you to cope with future changes of the group-structure, the group-reporting or the people involved, in a swift, efficient and correct manner. A solid preparation and proper organisation of the group consolidation process are equally important to the success of the group consolidation, as reporting the data itself or even processing the numbers in the consolidation. In this insight we explain the crucial steps that you should not miss in setting up the group consolidation process.

As element61 we want to deliver correct and reliable data. To guarantee this, we need to thoroughly structure the back- and front end and validate the data through a verification method. Qlik provides us with quick and developer-friendly tools to enable these validations. Additionally, we want to outline in this insight some tips & tricks on how to run and orchestrate such front- & back-end validations.

Mobile business intelligence has been part of everyone’s business intelligence roadmaps for quite some time now. However, until recently, Microsoft didn’t have a solid offering in its SQL Server BI stack that could tackle the specific needs of displaying reports and dashboards on mobile devices. With SQL Server 2016, Microsoft aims to change all this.

With the emergence of digitization and IoT, it becomes crucial for some companies to enable faster decision making through faster data insights. Gone are the days when everyone can wait for hours or days to look at insights and performance dashboards. In this insight, we have proven that providing these real-time insights means a change in system architecture for many business intelligence teams. In our expert opinion, we concluded that a best-practice real-time architecture consists of two main building blocks: a receiving end-point to receive the data streams and a real-time analytics layer to transform the data. We conclude that getting started with real-time analytics isn't complex: all leading vendors as well as open-source providers offer a serious of proven solutions and as solutions are offered through the cloud, they start with no investments needed (pay-as-you-go basis).

Today SAP Lumira is a powerful data visualization, dashboarding and analysis tool that can be used on top of SAP HANA, SAP BW and a multitude of other data sources. Business users can visualize their KPIs and prepare impressive business analytics storyboards based on large datasets. The key to success here is to have a performing data model together with a range of queries and views available “under the hood”. Additionally, developers can leverage a range of open source custom extensions in Lumira that will help you tell unique data stories relevant for your business.