Making Planning Analytics development more accessible
At our recent Data, AI & Analytics Forum, I shared something we’ve been working on at Aramar for quite some time: a different approach to building IBM Planning Analytics solutions.
It’s something I’m excited about because it addresses a challenge we’ve been trying to solve for years. Planning Analytics is a fantastic, powerful and flexible platform, but building solutions with it takes specialist skills. How can we make that development more accessible and help customers get more from it?
Before I get into that, there were a few other developments I was excited to share on the day.
A few of my highlights
IBM Controller Disclosure Management was high on my list. It was great to see Paul Allen’s demo. Sarah has already spent some time with it and is impressed by how easy it is to use. What I like about it is that it solves a specific problem that a lot of companies have: bringing the numbers and commentary together in a final, shareable report.
I was also keen to hear Stephen Green’s presentation on agentic AI in business intelligence and how it could change the way people interact with their analytics software.
Then there is Apptio. It isn’t a new product, but it is new to Aramar, and we’re hoping to make it part of our portfolio. It is about understanding IT spend and explaining the value of that spend within the business. With both IT and finance people in the room, I thought that Greg Holmes presentation would be particularly relevant.
Alongside those updates, I wanted to share a little of what’s been happening within our own team.
Getting more from Planning Analytics
Planning Analytics can do so much more than budgeting and reporting, because it’s a technology platform where you build solutions from the ground up to meet your requirements. Its flexibility is a huge strength.
In my experience, though, many customers only use a fraction of what it can do. There’s scope to get much more value from it, but there’s a barrier.
It takes time to become proficient enough to build robust, efficient Planning Analytics solutions. You need experience, and you can’t get away from the fact that it involves writing some code and not every business can support a full-time Planning Analytics developer.
We’ve been looking for ways to break down that barrier and over the years, we’ve delivered developer training to customers. That helps, but there’s only so far training can take you. It can’t replace years of experience.
We’ve also built a couple of out-of-the-box solutions, which are still available today. Those are useful, but by their nature they’re tied to a particular use case.
What we needed was a way to make Planning Analytics development more accessible across different requirements. We now have an approach that helps us do that. It’s very much Adam’s brainchild, and it’s already changing how we build solutions.
A toolkit for building solutions
Adam has developed Pustaka, a toolkit we can use to generate dimensions, cubes, views, sets, processes and pieces of code: the components that make up a Planning Analytics solution.
It is basically a library of code that can be used in Planning Analytics development, without ever having to learn to write code.
For me, why this is so great, is that customers will now have a way to continue developing their solutions as their requirements change.
It feels slightly wrong to talk about launching this because we’ve been using it in our Planning Analytics development for around two years. We’re simply now getting ready to share it.
We are in the process of thoroughly testing Pustaka to ensure it can be deployed seamlessly. And expect that this approach will increasingly define the way we build Planning Analytics solutions at Aramar. We’ve always known the platform could do more and making development more accessible gives us that practical way to help our customers better explore that potential.
If you’re interested and would like to know more, please get in touch at contactus@aramar.co.uk. Adam would be happy to talk you through it. It’s his baby, and he rarely stops talking about it anyway!