Globally, 98% of the 100 companies are SAP customers. As more and more businesses run their business operations on SAP generating huge volumes of data, they are pressed with this one fundamental concern: How to generate value from data? For this reason, SAP has come up with SAP Analytics Cloud, aimed to empower organizations to build powerful data management capabilities and power intelligent insights with business data that is accessible anywhere, at any time. But how does SAP Analytics Cloud help enterprises navigate through this data quagmire? This blog dishes out all the secrets.
Keep reading along.
Data Migration Strategies for a Smooth SAP ECC to S/4HANA Transition: Read the blog
From Data-informed to Data-driven: A Break-down of SAP Analytics Cloud
SAP Analytics Cloud can be defined as an enterprise SaaS analytics solution suite that comprises Augmented Analytics, Business Intelligence, and Planning capabilities. This helps firms understand their data better for effective decision-making.
Business Intelligence
Harnessing in-built BI capabilities empowers better data visualization for unique insights and improved decision-making. SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence is a holistic suite for data visualization, sharing, and reporting, providing meaningful insights anytime, anywhere. Here are features of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence:
- On-premise deployment
- Real-time business intelligence
- Increased user autonomy
- Personalized information consumption
Augmented Analytics
Integrating ML for accurate insights facilitates quick decision-making. Usually the analytics process is extremely manual-driven and labour intensive, taking up a major chunk of a data scientist’s time. Automating tasks such as data collection, cleansing, preparation, and analysis with SAP Analytics Augmented Analytics can empower data scientists to find deeper insights in less time and focus on strategic work such as interpreting results and reporting.
Planning
Leveraging SAP Analytics for Planning helps users combine planning, collaboration, and analysis in one application. In other words, it encourages team collaboration by unifying people to work on plans, driving improved business outcomes. Here are some of the planning operations that are taken care of by this tool:
- Scheduling tasks
- Enabling forecasts with predictive features
- Developing custom planning applications
- Facilitating data entry and version management
- Making powerful scripted calculations
How Does SAP Analytics Cloud Work?
SAP Analytics Cloud consists of three primary components: data, models, and stories.
Accessing Data
To perform the first step of the analytics, users must gain access to data. This data can be available in a database, application or a spreadsheet on-prem or cloud. With SAP Analytics Cloud, users can easily connect to these data sources to perform deep-dive analysis and gain unique insights for data-driven decision making. While spreadsheets can be directly uploaded on SAP Analytics Cloud Platform, larger and complex connections need more additional steps and procedures.
Building Data Models
After SAP Analytics Cloud gains access to data, the next step involves building a data model for specific data sources. The cloud platform performs data queries to make it ready for analysis. For instance, for sales analysis, the user needs details like Customer Name, Product Name, Price, Revenue, and Total Sales. While building a data model, users need to define dimensions, measures, and other information to enhance their analysis. The data modeling is usually carried out by Modeler, that focuses on leveraging AI and ML to accelerate their analytics tasks.
Visualizing Stories
Data is not restricted to number-crunching. It needs to fortell a business impact story. With the Stories feature in SAP Analytics Cloud, users can try out different data visualization tools such as tables, geo maps, charts and more. Presenting data that is clear and visual-driven and gives a very granular view into the insights that enables businesses to make actionable strategies to either solve a business challenge or meet a particular target or a goal.
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How Smart is SAP Analytics Cloud? Exploring its Smart Features
| Search to Insight | Analyzes data in real-time by searching for information about the data in the search box |
| Smart insights | Relies on statistical algorithms to analyze huge datasets and identifies key contributors influencing or affecting the result or an outcome. |
| Smart Discovery | Automates the overall process of data exploration and discovery by unraveling unknown or new relationships within data. |
| Smart Predict | Analyzes patterns or behavior in data to predict future business outcomes, trends or any future events thereby, streamlining decision-making. |
| Time Series Forecasting | Uses advanced statistical analysis to generate forecasts by analyzing trends, cycles, and outliers. |
| Smart Grouping | Users can visualize huge data clusters either on bubble charts or scatter plots. |
A Rundown of SAP Analytics Cloud’s Core Features
| Features | Application |
| Pre-built Business Content Packages | In-built with templates that are free to download, customizable, and configurable, along with industry and line-of-business content to enhance content creation and access through SAP Analytics Cloud Content Network. |
| SAP Digital Boardroom | Creates interactive real-time boardroom presentations. Connects to both SAP and non-SAP applications to offer visibility into different business operations and metrics from a single windowpane, assisting executives to address real-time ad hoc questions. |
| Analytic Applications | Professional designers leverage advanced scripting to build complex custom applications for complex business use-cases. |
| Analytics Catalog | A single point of contact for users to publish and access content within SAP Analytics Cloud. |
| MS Office Integration | MS Office Integration with SAP Analytics Cloud assists users to connect and import data from data models from SAP Analytics Cloud to MS Excel for formatting and enhancing data in one single location. |
| Data Analyzer | Lets users query data directly and perform real-time analysis using a pivot table styled analysis view without the need to build a story or a data model in SAP Analytics Cloud. |
Quick Steps to Integrate SAP HANA Data with Amazon S3: Read the blog
Outlining Important Data Analytics Tools
Apart from SAP Analytics Cloud, here are the other two popular SAP data analytics tools:
| Tools | Description |
| SAP Lumira | Ensuring robust decision-making, users can develop infographics, impactful interactive maps, charts, dashboards, and (BI) applications in an efficient and cost-effective manner. |
| SAP Business Objects | Serving as centralized data visualization, reporting, and sharing suite, this tool breaks down huge chunks of data into relevant insights and is available anytime, anywhere. |
Key Use Cases for Embracing SAP Analytics Cloud
- Corporate Performance Management (CPM): Integrating SAP Analytics Cloud offers businesses round-the-clock visibility into their performance by monitoring and managing their business operations, ensuring better business objectives.
- Financial Analytics: Using the SAP Analytics Cloud for building financial analytics dashboards can help organizations in defining workforce metrics for budgeting, forecasting, and monitoring financial performance.
- Predictive Analytics: With SAP Analytics Cloud, companies can improve their freight quote pricing based on historical data and future freight costs predictions.
- Healthcare Analytics: Leveraging SAP Analytics Cloud along with SAP Predictive Analytics and SAP Lumira helps in offering actionable insights for making data-driven and beneficial healthcare policies.
- HR Analytics: To streamline HR processes, users can leverage AI-infused event-driven extensions for carrying out basic tasks.
Facing Challenges in Leveraging SAP Data Analytics Solutions? Get Started with Cloud4C
Around 62% of IT leaders have been investing in the cloud for improving their data analytics activities. As an SAP transformation partner, Cloud4C comes with the expertise of implementing SAP data analytics solutions and delivering superior customer experiences for Fortune 500 companies.
Our experts can help firms in leveraging SAP Analytics Cloud to visualize, plan and predict better business outcomes. Additionally, we also deploy BW/4HANA on-premise, on the cloud, or adopt a hybrid model to help organizations use data in a better way, optimizing process and fostering innovations. This includes our SAP Analytics Consulting and data modernization services that have helped clients in building robust data foundations to process huge amounts of data and gather meaningful insights from both structured and unstructured data.
Want to stay ahead of your data analytics game? Visit our website for further information or get in touch with our representatives today.
