Enhancing Your Investment with IBM Planning Analytics Health Checks
As businesses increasingly depend on data-driven decision-making, it’s crucial to ensure that your analytics platforms are running smoothly, efficiently, and in alignment with your strategic objectives.
Companies invest in IBM Planning Analytics to move beyond the limitations of Excel and unlock greater ROI through advanced financial planning and data analytics. While Excel can be prone to errors and inefficiencies, Planning Analytics offers robust automation, scalability, and real-time insights, reducing manual processes and improving accuracy.
However, over time, issues can arise that may hinder the system’s performance. Whether it’s slow report generation, outdated processes, or integration challenges with new technology, these inefficiencies can accumulate, leading to reduced productivity and missed opportunities for optimisation.
This is where a check under the hood is worth doing.
Why Health Checks are Essential for IBM Planning Analytics
A health check provides a structured way to evaluate your current Planning Analytics environment, identify potential issues, and unlock opportunities for improvement. By optimising your system, you not only enhance performance but also maximise your return on investment (ROI) and ensure that the platform evolves alongside your business.
IBM Planning Analytics is a highly flexible system with complex Cube rule dependencies that can create bottlenecks or inaccuracies if not properly maintained.
Regular health checks offer several key benefits:
- Performance Optimisation: Over time, you may notice that reports are taking longer to generate or that processes seem cumbersome. A health check helps identify these performance bottlenecks and provides actionable recommendations to streamline your operations.
- Alignment with Best Practices: Ensuring that your system is following industry best practices is essential for both performance and futureproofing. A health check assesses your environment against these benchmarks and highlights areas where improvements can be made.
- User Skill Enhancement: Many organisations encounter challenges with their analytics systems due to a lack of expertise or proper training. A health check can reveal gaps in user knowledge and offer targeted training recommendations, empowering your team to use the system more effectively.
- Adaptability to Business Changes: As your business grows and evolves, so should your analytics system. A health check ensures that your IBM Planning Analytics environment is aligned with your current and future business objectives, making it easier to adapt to new challenges and opportunities.
Optimising performance, design and process
A thorough health check is akin to the pre-Green Slip check for your car: It takes a look at the critical elements to sure everything is working as it should and if something’s amiss or needs some attention, you can deal with it before it becomes a major problem.
For Planning Analytics, you might want to routinely check:
Let’s look at these in a little more detail.
Performance: If reports are taking longer than expected to generate or if processing times are noticeably slow, these are signs that your system may be underperforming. Addressing these inefficiencies can significantly enhance productivity and ensure that your team has the insights they need in a timely manner.
Design of your application: Reviewing the structure of cubes and dimensions is crucial to ensure that your system is configured to meet your current data needs. Over time, unnecessary or redundant rules may accumulate, creating bottlenecks that slow down the system. By refining your application design, you can improve overall system efficiency and reduce complexity.
Alignment with your business strategy: As your organisation grows and your objectives evolve, your Planning Analytics environment must be able to adapt. A health check helps to ensure that your system is flexible enough to meet your future needs and that it continues to support your long-term business goals.
Consider a health check preventative maintenance and optimisation
For clients who have invested in IBM Planning Analytics (PA), periodic system evaluations—or health checks—are essential to ensure that their system continues to deliver the value expected, even as their business needs evolve.
The formula to a successful solution and achieving the ROI on your investment is ensuring it remains the right fit, with the ability to grow and adapt with your organisation.
