SAP Analytics Cloud: SAP Journey for Cloud Analytics
The world is moving towards digitization and there is no doubt that organizations are generating more information than ever before. This information is an asset to any organization which can help them to identify key business drivers, predict future trends, plan the budget and make the most effective data-driven decisions. It is no surprise that data-driven organizations usually outperform their contemporaries.
Now, for a business or enterprise, willing to become data-driven, the question is — How to do that? Well, SAP Analytics Cloud is your answer. And in this article, we will tell you how it works and how can you utilize it for your business.
SAP Analytics Cloud
SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) is a one-stop solution that allows business users to discover, analyze, plan and predict their data on a single platform. You may think of it as a Software as a Service Solutions (SaaS), built on SAP Cloud Platform which allows business users to perform operations related to business intelligence, planning and predictive analytics in one place.
Also Read: SAP DWC: The Future of Data Warehousing
SAP Analytics cloud is centered on the following three fundamental components that help business users to get meaningful information out of their business-critical data for better decision making:
- Data
- Models
- Stories
Data
Data is the raw material in the production of information and useful business/organization data helps to achieve better results. Input data is what we send for modeling and story creation, in order to fetch quality analytics.
SAP Analytics Cloud is built on the SAP HANA Cloud Platform, empowering both Business Intelligence and Planning users to connect, prepare and leverage Live and imported data from a wide range of sources. These sources include on-premise database, cloud database, Spreadsheets and web sources.
SAP Analytics Cloud also supports live connectivity with SAP HANA, SAP BW, SAP BW/4HANA, SAP S/4HANA, SAP Business object Universe.
Models
Data modeling is an integral part of any organization`s ability to analyze and extract meaningful inside-out of their data. Data model determines how data is exposed to business users for better decision-making.
In SAP Analytics Cloud, models are the foundation for the data visualization and explorations in stories. Depending on what business users are looking for, we can create analytical and planning models in SAC.
- Analytics Model
An Analytical Model uses Machine Learning algorithms to automatically clean your data and to detect possible data errors while creating a model for visualization and stories.
2. Planning Model
The Planning Model performs additional modeling features such as Advanced Data Entry Capabilities, Version Management, and Data Actions which will help users to have more control over data.
Practices to adopt for Modeling
Data in modelers is very important as it is used in stories as well as in multiple tools attached to your SAC platform. So, you can adopt the following practices to improve the effectiveness of your analytics process:
- Data Wrangling is required to re-checking the data is rows and columns of your model so that the inconsistencies or typo errors in the captured data don’t affect your stories and reports. For this, you can replace the synonyms with a common word, merge cells and perform other operations for this.
- Hierarchy creation is needed as you might have data from multiple locations. These hierarchies can be location-based, such as divisions on the basis of continents, countries, states and so on. It will help you do better layering and analysis.
- Setting Currencies or Units is another thing you might prefer doing when you deal with multiple currencies with different values or variable units. Or, you may convert different units/currencies into a common one using desired formulae on the relevant data.
Stories
Stories can be created on top of the Models to enrich business-critical data. Stories allow us to explore and visualize data in the form of charts, graphs, geo maps, tables and other visual components.
Some other interesting features are also provided by SAP which we can utilize while working with stories:
1. Smart Discovery:
With smart discovery feature, we can find hidden relationships and structures within the data. It utilizes Machine Learning algorithms to identify the key influence of the KPI and help us to discover valuable insights.
2. Search to insight:
Search to insight helps us to uncover insights about the data in the form of a chart or graph by asking questions in natural language.
3. Visualization:
SAC (SAP Analytics Cloud) lets users integrate their created R environment into the tool. Here, R is an open-source programming language and is uses in a wide variety of statistical and graphical projects. It is highly extensible and is often considered ideal for linear and nonlinear modeling, classification problems, time-series analysis, clustering, and other such visualization. So through it, you can create different visualizations as per user need based on your R scripts.
All these stories can be shared with other users and can be collaborated upon.
Also Read: SAP S/4 HANA Implementation On Cloud: Machinery Manufacturing Company
Benefits of SAP Analytics Cloud for Your Business
Now that you are well-acquainted with the SAC tool, here are a few good features or benefits that you must consider (besides the ones we have told already):
· It implements machine learning for smart discovery, insights and transformation. It implies that this SaaS solution will perform predictive analytics in an automated way and is very effective for your venture.
· This cloud analytics platform can fetch data from the cloud as well as on-premise SAP configured in your premise, giving you a comprehensive analytics report.
· Not just on-premise SAP, SAC can even work well with non-SAP data as it can provide you the access to it in real-time.
· You can create the forecasting, budget, analysis and planning models in one place with its help.
· It provides accurate and real-time reports that help in improving your decision-making and implementation strategies perfectly.
The Final Word
In case you want to implement your business analytics solution on SAP Analytics Cloud platform, we at Stridely Solutions will be happy to help you. Having more than a decade of experience, we provide custom-fit solutions to industries and organizations across the globe.
