The Cognos TM1 model at AVEVA™ plays a critical role in the financial planning, forecasting and reporting for the business. As AVEVA grows, the demand for better quality, and more timely information increases. We need to react quickly to this by producing more advanced models in TM1.

At AVEVA we always develop new models and enhance existing models in our development (UAT) environment to reduce the risk of downtime for users. However, once a model has been tested and is ready to be put into our production environment, we face the challenge of migrating everything associated with this new model, including dimensions, processes and cubes from development to the production environment. Knowing exactly which parts of the model are new and which ones already exist in the production environment is a real challenge.

Using Pulse’s migration function has dramatically improved the entire process of copying a model from one environment to another. Not only has it saved time for the TM1 administrators, but with the advanced features of Pulse, for instance being able to automatically see all the dependencies associated with the model, it has given us great confidence knowing that everything necessary will have been migrated.

We have also benefitted from being able to delay the migration of a model into production (if we are not ready to immediately deploy to production) by creating a migration package as soon as the model has been built and approved, enabling us to capture everything whilst still fresh in our minds. This has also enabled the introduction of alternative roles for the TM1 administrators, allowing for segregation of duties; one administrator can create the package whilst another can import the package after thoroughly checking.

Pulse has introduced many very useful features for the TM1 administrators at AVEVA:

One alert that is particularly beneficial is knowing immediately if any of the TM1 servers are offline, allowing quick diagnosis and therefore reducing downtime for users.

Being able to track changes to rules and processes and utilising the roll-back feature has been of great benefit. This has allowed us to very quickly get to the bottom of issues that have been caused by changes to the system without having to trawl through rules and processes to try and manually find the problem.

We have been able to utilise the system diagrams to help us to enhance models and help users understand how data flows between cubes and external data sources.

Having the ability to disconnect a user who has unwittingly caused a blockage in the system means that other users are not held-up unnecessarily for any length of time. As we have many remote users this is particularly beneficial to us.

AVEVA is one of British engineering software’s greatest success stories. From an innovative and visionary concept spun out of the University of Cambridge 50 years ago, AVEVA has become a global technology leader providing engineering, design and information management software to the Process, Plant and Marine industries.