Case Study: Cellular South Taps IBM Cognos TM1, Revelwood For Business Performance Management

“We didn’t have a great deal of internal IT resources for the implementation and ongoing support for the new system, so we needed to work with a mature vendor with deep experience in TM1,” said Jones. “Revelwood fit the bill perfectly. They have dozens of successful TM1 implementations under their belt, stellar references and what I like to call their ‘bag of tricks’ – the pre-built models, templates and reports that dramatically reduced the overall implementation time and quickly improved our reporting efficiency.”

More specifically, these tools included Revelwood Implementation Accelerator and Revelwood Report Manager – out-of-the-box services and software for enterprise financial planning and reporting running on the IBM Cognos TM1 platform. These tools allow TM1 customers to get up and running quickly and easily, leveraging the best of TM1’s real-time OLAP functionality, along with best practices developed from Revelwood's years of experience developing such solutions.

Results

“From the get go, TM1 greatly facilitated our data collection for the budget, giving us a central place for departments to input detailed information,” said Croft. “People now have more access to reporting. They can drill down to the details to see, on a nightly basis, who the vendor is, or the details of what makes up each account line item. This enables us to reference the individual transactions that make up the totals in our financial reports.”

“That’s been huge, as it’s relieved a great deal of burden from the accounting folks. We no longer have to manually look up invoices. All the information was trapped in the account and we were the gatekeepers – which was not the way we wanted it to work.”

TM1 offers a transparency that allows people to go into their statements anytime during the month to get up-to-date information and spot problems well in advance. It also allows for fast, flexible reporting and ad-hoc analysis.

“We’re living in a very dynamic industry and we’re constantly trying to figure out what the rest of the year will look like,” said Jones. “Right now, we’re looking to leverage TM1 in that sense. Our biggest challenge about forecasting has always been the ability to fluctuate between scenarios. With this system, all you have to do is change the scenario from budget to actual and then it automatically refreshes based on that update. That’s the value of having a system that works with an Excel interface. It’s easy to use and has made our lives much easier.”