IBM Planning Analytics Partner – Expert Consultancy and Support
As an IBM Gold Business Partner, and one of the longest-serving IBM consultancies in the UK, Simpson Associates have the experience and expertise to help you discover, implement, and adopt your IBM Planning Analytics project. Our experts are led by a team of certified accountants, who have the financial insight to understand the challenges of your finance team.
If you are looking to empower your organisation with speed, flexibility, and foresight on a platform built for financial planning, sales, supply chain, human resources, demand planning and more, we will work with your organisation to meet your specific requirements. As IBM experts, we communicate clearly and follow through on our promises – however big or small.
Skill sharing is all part of the service that we offer to all our customers. We understand the need for key personnel to be able to take ownership of your Planning Analytics solution following implementation. This takes away the need for ongoing consultancy following the successful implementation of your Planning Analytics project.
For organisations that don’t have the in-house skills or resources, or struggle during critical periods, we also offer an IBM Planning Analytics Managed Service. This gives you peace of mind and prevents issues from becoming incidents with maintained proactive monitoring and more, meaning your IBM environment will continue to run without disruption.
See it for yourself: take a look at some of the organisations that we have worked with to implement IBM Planning Analytics Powered by TM1.
“We wanted to integrate our overall planning model to create a holistic view of the whole process: data flowing automatically between the student planning model and the staff planning model meant that we could save staff resource time maintaining them and ensure we were able to get accurate information out of the system in real time.”
Rebecca Radics
Project Manager, Nottingham Trent University
Planning, Budgeting & Forecasting with Simpson Associcates
For many organisations the process of building and maintaining budgets and forecasts and producing financial performance reporting relies on a complex and manually intensive spreadsheet process.
We work with many customers whose Finance teams still spend an inordinate amount of time in manual, spreadsheet-based processes – collecting, consolidating and validating data. Because of that, these finance professionals are often unable to deliver plans, budgets, forecasts, reports and value-added analysis in a timely fashion.
The net result can be budgets or re-forecasts being submitted without the level of scrutiny and verification desired. Indeed, for one of our customers, our work has enabled him to stop worrying and to be able to sleep at night.
Our applications result in demonstrable process efficiencies and provide the clear line of sight to understand and to guide business performance. Reducing the manual nature of many current planning processes results in greater accuracy and time for analysis and adjustments and, in many cases, for “scenario planning” capability; all providing greater control and insight.
Engagement from Requirements to Support
“As Holman Fenwick Willan has grown and new systems implemented, the Finance Department found itself relying on a large number of reporting and budgeting applications that were either unsupported or which provided inconsistent messages to the firm. This situation presented a perfect opportunity in 2015 to undertake a review of business requirements with the goal of introducing a single solution capable of delivering a comprehensive budgeting, forecasting and reporting application. IBM Cognos TM1 was selected as being best able to deliver that capability.
Simpson Associates were initially engaged to undertake the review of the existing HFW systems and to provide recommendations on possible solutions. Following that project, Simpsons were engaged to implement IBM Cognos TM1 as they were able to demonstrate:
• An excellent record in delivering the system to meet budgeting, forecasting and reporting requirements;
• Proven experience in working for law firms
• A clear understanding of HFW’s requirements and business culture.
The selection process involved a number of other consultancies and whilst they had the technical capability and a clear understanding of requirements, only Simpson Associates had the proven law firm experience.“ Paul Jenkins, Head of IT Projects and Change at Holman Fenwick Willian
“Simpson Associates have worked with us through a collaborative approach, delivering a bespoke solution to address the specific needs of our business. Commercial reporting is a key driver in allowing management to make agile decisions in the dynamic food sector. Simpson’s understood this perfectly and provided expert insight into the development of the IBM Cognos TM1 tool that has vastly improved the consistency and speed of our reporting.”
Phil Yeomans
Commercial and Reporting Accountant at Symington’s
Engagement with Simpson Associates
Simpson Associates are a software and services consultancy specialising in delivering budgeting, reporting, forecasting and business planning solutions built on IBM Planning Analytics (formally known as IBM Cognos TM1), and the IBM Cognos suite. With clients including The University of Oxford, Symington’s, Holman Fenwick Willan and Nottingham Trent University we have the experience and expertise to help you discover, implement and adopt the technology.