IBM Planning Analytics Health Check

Our health assessments are a critical part of maintaining your enterprise-wide applications, using a logical approach to examining existing applications and future development opportunities.

  • Document the Solution
  • Interview Users
  • Document Performance Issues
  • Provide Recommendations
  • Go Forward Plan

Performance Diagnostics are a crucial part of maintaining your business.  These are some of the processes and procedures ForQuest will preform to analyze and assess your IBM Planning Analytics solution.  The service will provide a post-implementation analysis and review of all aspects of your Planning Analytics application.  Review all existing IBM Planning Analytics software products and associated infrastructure.

The process begins with information and requirements gathering phase:

  • Review your current hardware and system configuration
  • Review application structure related to cubes, metadata and business logic.
  • Analyze data integration and dimension and meta-data governance
  • Review administration and maintenance management procedures

Upon completion of the review, ForQuest will deliver a detailed report outlining:

  • Key findings
  • Opportunities
  • Risks related to application design and performance
  • Recommendations to reduce operating cost of the applications
  • Review current business strategy and offer recommendations on leveraging your investment in IBM Planning Analytics to align with your business strategy.

Overall Infrastructure

Overall Infrastructure

A review of the IBM Planning Analytics infrastructure will be performed to assess your hardware configuration, software version, and database and backup procedure review. We will investigate and highlight any performance issues and bottlenecks and suggest potential solutions.

Design Review​

Design Review

Review of the original information requirements of the business with a comparison of today’s requirements and whether the current solution achieves the original objectives. ForQuest can also interview selected users of the solution to identify any new requirements.

Dimensions​

Dimensions

Review existing metadata and object design including folder structure, joins and security. Meta-data integration, review dimension hierarchy structures,default subsets are set and properly utilized, review multi-dimensional expression usage related to functionality and performance.

Cubes

Cubes

Review your existing cubes and analyze whether they meet the following: Fast response–will review all aspects of the cube design to highlight any potential performance improvements. Accuracy–external changes may have affected the accuracy of your cubes. Dimension Order–size and scarcity.

Turbo Integrator

Turbo Integrator

Determine whether TI scripting is commented, process runtime cube is being populated consistently in the EPILOG, subsets are created and maintained via TI vs. manual updating. cube views are created and maintained via TI vs. manual updating, utilizing “}” for system views and subsets for control purposes.

Interface and Reports

Interfaces and Reports

Review IBM Planning Analytics Excel reports, Active Forms and Web Sheets to determine they are well organized in Application Folders, utilizing Stargate views developed with proper use of Active Form functions for efficiency,and Review Action Buttons within Web Sheets

Security Review

Security Review

Demonstrate the powerful security features available in Cognos Access Manager (CAM) and/or LDAP, which you can implement to ensure that only suitable staff has access to sensitive data. We will review your current authentication mechanism and demonstrate methods for improving faster access such as automatic sign-on.

Automation

Automation

Review your procedures for the production and scheduling of reports and cubes with the intent of reducing any manual intervention to a minimum through the use of IBM Planning Analytics automation systems. The automation step will be to perform a review,process scheduling through TM1 Chores, report scheduling

Review and Report all Findings and Recommendations​

Review and Report all Findings and Recommendations​

Compile the information obtained during the audit into a comprehensive health check report. This detailed report will include the key strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and risks of the solution.