TM1 vs. SAP BPC

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gumer
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TM1 vs. SAP BPC

Post by gumer »

Greetings:

My company plans on implmenting a CPM solution (consolidation, budgeting/planning, reporting) and we're deciding between Cognos/TM1 and BPC. We are an SAP shop and the SQL platform (and integration with SAP) is very alluring to us but the TM1 OLAP engine is a huge plus for Cognos. We've scoped out both applications and they both seem to do a good job at meeting all of our requirements.

What are the key differences between the two? At first, one of our main concerns was TM1's ability to meet all of our consolidation requirements since it's not known primarily as a consolidation tool. It seems to do that. Our other concerns are: ease of implementing, setting up drill-throughs to source systems and transaction level detail, ease of setting up cubes, data integration, etc.

Also, TM1 has been around for some time but seems to be a tool that very few people in the CPM field know about. If you talk to Hyperion or BPC, they dismiss TM1 as a comprehensive consolidation/planning/reporting solution. Any thoughts as to why?

I would love to hear some thoughts. Thanks!
Marcus Scherer
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Re: TM1 vs. SAP BPC

Post by Marcus Scherer »

I can't answer your questions, but I thought that SAP would promote Cartesis for consolidation purposes. BPC (the former Outlooksoft, right?) was supposed to be used for financial planning. But maybe they have changed their mind.
I doubt that Outlooksoft has been more common or known than TM1 in the past.

Regards,
Marcus
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rollo19
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Re: TM1 vs. SAP BPC

Post by rollo19 »

Cognos integrates nicely with SAP. Do you have or might you have any other data sources (CRM, HR, acquired assets..) you might want to analyse & report over ? TM1 is an efficient large OLAP option and just another data source for Cognos BI which is pretty much source agnostic. There are shops out there like QueBIT who have specialist financial consolidation applications built around TM1.
lotsaram
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Re: TM1 vs. SAP BPC

Post by lotsaram »

Potentially a hot potato due to IBM's historical alliance with SAP...

I agree with Marcus, before being acquired by BO and then SAP and then being rebranded as BPC, OutlookSoft was much less widely known and much less widely implemented than TM1.

The main selling point of BPC over TM1 would be the "SAP single platform" or interconnectedness argument, however I would caution how real this is and how much is sales smoke and mirrors. OLS was built on a MS SSAS platform, this is being transitioned to SAP Netweaver but I have heard that the Netweaver build is not yet complete and not yet stable. So going with the latest release of BPC is risking bleeding edge vs leading edge whereas TM1 x64 MOLAP has been around for years and is both stable and highly scalable.

Scalability is something to look at in detail. Historically OLS struggled with performance with both multiple users and large cube sizes whereas TM1 will handle large planning models and hundreds of users with ease (maybe less of an issue for you if you are only looking at consolidations and therefore only high level financials.)

Implementation time: Much faster with TM1.

Ease of use: BPC and TM1 have very similar cube browsing and Excel front ends, however people who have used both generally say that TM1 is more intuitive and easier to use and that BPC/OLS is slower and "more clunky."

Ability to handle consolidations functional requirements: TM1 as a MOLAP modelling engine will handle consolidations and eliminations with ease. Ease of setting up data integration, cubes, security and reporting? Very easy, quick and straightforward (I would say much quicker than BPC but I am biased.) Drill through to transactional detail with TM1, this is more technical, probably more set-up required than a ROLAP solution, but once it is set up it works very nicely.

Point solution vs enterprise solution: This is where I believe TM1 has the advantage over just about every product out there. As the engine is so inherently flexible it can be applied enterprise wide to any data set or reporting/business modelling need far beyond the initial point solution. Whereas solutions like Hyperion and BPC will more than likely do what they were implemented for and nothing more.

In terms of your last question. In general TM1 has the "better engine under the hood" but suffers from a lack of pre built UI and financial consolidation mapping wizards that the likes of Hyperion have over TM1 in spades. Yes TM1 as a tool can do consolidations/planning/reporting but the hitherto lack of "out of the box" tools and UI has hurt the product on the sales front as TM1 has always been a "build it yourself" solution and this the main objection or throw away dismissive line raised by other vendors. It is a valid point and certainly hurts in the sales process, but speed of build and ease of use still results in shorter implementation time and lower TCO for TM1 versus everything else. Probably also on this point IBM is still pushing Cognos Consolidations (Frango) over TM1 for financial consolidations precisely to compete on the whole UI out of the box mapping wizards front.

I would be very interested to hear what others have to say on this but be warned that you are likely to get responses biased to TM1 on this forum!
Jeroen Eynikel
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Re: TM1 vs. SAP BPC

Post by Jeroen Eynikel »

Hi,


first off I will state that I am biased towards TM1 as I know the product a lot better.

That being said: unless you absolutelely need to have workflow (sorry but planning manager is only surrogate workflow) I see no reason at all to go for SAP BPC.

Implementation time, ease of use, flexibility, query response time, this is all a lot better in TM1.

To give you an idea: at my company (consulting) we use both. 2 weeks ago me and a colleague who has 2 years+ experience with SAP BPC built a very simple sales analysis model in both applications. My TM1 model was done in about an hour, his SAP BPC model wasn't finished after a full day...

The budgetting model at my own company was built in SAP BPC and I am hugely unimpressed by it. To me it seems a very simple model, yet they need to run nightly scripts that take several hours to update the data, which is unimaginable for TM1.

To me it also seems unlikely that business users can create a lot in SAP BPC without IT assistance. In TM1 this is no problem. We have CFO's (that are a bit IT minded - granted) that built and maintain their own budget model in TM1 - I can not see this happening with SAP BPC.

I would summarize it as: TM1 is a business tool that deals with most of the drawbacks of spreadsheets, SAP BPC is an IT tool to help the (financial reporting) business.
Kaveenga
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Re: TM1 vs. SAP BPC

Post by Kaveenga »

Hi Gumer,

Would be interested to know which product your company finaly went with and why.

Thanks

Kavee
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Re: TM1 vs. SAP BPC

Post by vaneagle »

Hi,

The company I work for is a 'SAP House' as well.

We have just started using TM1 over the past 6 months for budgeting. At some point in the next few months I will start the management reporting side of this to replace our SAP reports. Our future stages will involve bringing in non-financial information to support our financial information.

Having used SAP BW and doing the same in TM1 ther is no real comparison. TM1 runs rings around SAP BW in terms of showing and aggregating the data. As mentioned above, TM1 is more intuitive and easy to learn compared to SAP BW. I have used BO and that is not to hard to use but I would still say TM1 is easier to learn and use.

TM1 is much more flexible as well and you can make changes on the fly pretty quickly as well ;)

not too biased am I!

As far as my knowledge of TM1 is concerned I am on L plates...
ruth
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Re: TM1 vs. SAP BPC

Post by ruth »

Has anyone done a comparison of the latest version of SAP BPC with the BusinessObjects integration, i.e BPC version 7.5?
Samir
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Re: TM1 vs. SAP BPC

Post by Samir »

Legal Consol:- I feel that Your choice for legal Consol is right. If you want to be on SAP platform for Consol, you should look at CARTESIS only (BOFC is the new name for the same). BPC will need a lot of custom build enhancements and hence not recommended. BPC lacks a lot of standard legal consolidation functionalities which comes out of the box in many other tools. Being an SAP shop, CARTESIS should be far better choice.

Budget, Mgt Consol & Reporting:- Considering the fact that you will need more integration for forecast, YTD, EFY and ongoing reporting for financials/non-financials; when you have 60-70% of your data in SAP, it makes sense to do this in SAP BPC 7.5 NW. We have done couple of projects and it has stabilized well. You can always get some colors on top of this infrastructure by using BOBJ BI components.

While SAP BPC as a Budget/Mgt Consol works well, It is the wrong tool for complex legal Consolidation process. This should improve in the years to come. (2010)

Samir
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DevGreg
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Re: TM1 vs. SAP BPC

Post by DevGreg »

Hello,

I would like to know if some additional opinions can be brought to this subject since the last post?

Indeed, my company currently uses TM1 and wants to create a few mock-ups on SAP BPC to see how similar things can be managed.

Thanks for your feedback, I shall provide you mine once this project is over.

Regards,

Greg
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Re: TM1 vs. SAP BPC

Post by akawshik »

I worked on BPC for the last 2+ years.
Now I moved to a different company and they are looking into both TM1 and BPC.

Here are some of points that I came across....any clarification or additional inputs are welcome.

BPC
Strong in Excel based planning
Power point integration
Offline planning
Easier integration with SAP products
Comments that goes with the plan numbers

TM1
Strong in Web based planning
Easy to perform what-if analysis
Better performance for the investment
Easier integration with IBM products



Thanks
Kawshik
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Re: TM1 vs. SAP BPC

Post by nick_leeson »

Greg,

While the above posts will give you a broad overview of TM1 vs. SAP BPC. I personally think you need to do a lot more analysis on what would you like to achieve from your investment vis a vis TM1 or SAP BPC.


As for the mock ups for SAP BPC vs TM1 I can only say , it depends i.e.
1) Use of TM1 in your organization, i.e. Is it only used for traditional Budgeting & Forecasting ?
2) Are you a SAP Shop ?
3) What are the key pain points for users today with TM1 ?

With HANA and SAP's single minded focus on the EPM, the gap will only get narrower. TM1's strength is well documented but unfortunately IBM's resolve and focus to address TMI's shortcomings is frankly at best average. Things take a lot time for things to move in Big Blue.

I am very comfortable in SAP BPC and TM1 and switched back to SAP BPC due to career progression.

Cheers
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