The most exiting feature of IBM Planning Analytics is Alternate hierarchy! With alternate hierarchy you will be able to reduce the number of dimensions in your cubes. You don’t need to choose between added an attribute or a dimension. Now all atributes can be seen as an alternate hierarchy.

One Time dimension for reporting cube

For example, in your reporting cubes, you don’t need to have Year and Month dimension in two different dimension.

For example if you have a cube with one Year and one Month dimension:

You could replace it with one Time dimension which combines both:

With Architect and TM1

With Planning Analytics for Excel (PAx), you can view at the same time the data from two hierarchies of the same dimension:

The main benefits of using Alternate hierarchy is to reduce the number of dimension in your cubes.

There are lots of benefits of using Alternate Hierarchies

Replace one Year and one Month dimension with one Time dimension

How to rebuild your TM1 Active Form

The TM1 Active Form is the most popular way to build report in TM1. TM1 developers love Active Form because they give them lots of freedom and flexibility such as:

• Dynamic rows
• Show attribute values.
• Show values and text side by side.
• Show data from multi-cubes in the same table.

As it is PAx does not support Alternate Hierarhies in DBRW, you could try to do it with PAW but you will quickly reach the limit of a drag and drop tool

With Canvas you have the same flexibility as you are used to in Active Forms: