New capabilities. New look.
IBM has just released what could be the most significant update to Planning Analytics Workspace (PAW) since its initial launch. This release (v57) is available now for local installation (on premise) and will follow with the cloud update later in October.
Despite multiple releases every year (10 in the last 12 months), PAW has been lacking new "wow" features recently but that has changed with release 57 - we get some of the features IBM has been teasing us with for the past year.
So, what’s new?
New look & feel
New charting & visualisations
Predictive forecasting
Plans & Applications
Let's have a look at the more of the detail:
New landing page – user content is presented as a list, rather than series of tiles. Includes Favourites & Recents tabs. New Quick launch buttons (depending upon user access rights).
The overall look & feel is fresher and shares many similarities with Cognos Analytics.
New Dashboards – greater control of objects within a book via the expanded properties tab.
Align multiple objects at the same time & view grid lines to help with positioning.
New Charts & Visualisations – 25 in total, including Waterfall & Bullet.
Start with an empty visualisation, rather than converting an exploration (crosstab) and the use drop zones. Changes can then be made via the new Fields tab.
Predictive forecasting uses statistical algorithms to create a forecast, from historical data.
Uses 8 exponential smoothing algorithms to assess historical data and then applies the best fit to future time periods
Applications consist of related assets (books, views & websheets) that are grouped into sections.
A plan contains assets that grouped into steps e.g. tasks or contributions that must be completed. Steps can be assigned a due date and submission for approval is optional
I'm looking forward to testing these new features some more, especially Forecasting and Plans, to see the use case scenarios. With quite a few Planning Analytics users coming from the Cognos Planning (the old Adatuym product) it will interesting to see how Plans compare to the hierarchy based planning that was quite prevalent, in both Cognos Planning & TM1 Application Web.
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