What is SAP Analytics Cloud?
Business Intelligence (BI) is a booming industry. More and more companies want to be able to make data-driven decisions and implement data-driven policies. Many companies possess a wealth of information in the form of data, often stored in systems such as SAP HANA. However, it can be difficult to gain insight into this data. To make this easier, tools have been developed that focus specifically on analyzing and, above all, visualizing data. Examples include Tableau and Power BI. SAP’s response to these tools is SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC).
SAP Analytics Cloud makes it very easy to visualize data, particularly from SAP systems. In fact, the development of SAC specifically took into account the use of data from SAP systems. However, SAC also works well in situations where an SAP system isn’t used, such as when working with Excel, CSV files, or an Oracle database. SAC is, therefore, an excellent data visualization tool. But it can do a bit more than traditional data visualization tools.
Data modeling and data wrangling: the first step toward effective data visualization
After loading data from an external source, such as an SAP database, you still need to clean up the data and prepare it for visualization. This process is called data wrangling. SAC provides a user-friendly menu for this purpose, where you can specify, for each column, the data type it contains and what should be done with any empty fields in the column. You can also add or remove columns as needed. This allows you to thoroughly prepare the data for analysis and visualization.
In order to visualize data in a clear, informative, and—above all—accurate way, a data visualization tool needs a definition of how the data to be used is related to one another. In other words, a data model must exist and be defined within the visualization tool. In SAC’s data modeler, you can link tables together in a visually clear way. This allows SAC to understand the relationships between the data from the various tables and, as a result, query the data seamlessly for further data analysis.
Simple data visualization, analysis, and planning
Once the data has been properly loaded, wrangled, and modeled, it must be clearly visualized for analysis. This visualization is achieved by building a dashboard, which is called a “Story” in SAC. These stories are designed so that even users with less technical expertise can easily build a story. A story uses charts to create an overview of the data that, if built correctly, enables a quick visual analysis of the data. One advantage of the stories in SAC is that you can build them interactively. This means that if you click on a value, bar, or line in a chart, the other charts in the story will update to show the specific data and its relationship to the selected data. So if someone clicks on the data for “Region X” in a chart within the story, the other charts will display their data in relation to Region X. This makes analysis even easier. A particular advantage of SAC, compared to competing tools, is its extensive GEO representations. These are interactive “maps” that allow you to clearly map activity by country, region, or city, enabling a quick analysis by area.
Another useful feature of SAC is planning. In addition to providing visual insights into data, planning was a key objective for the developers when creating SAC. For example, SAC’s Smart Insights feature lets you quickly see which factors have had the greatest impact on a specific data point. This makes it immediately clear, for instance, in which areas a particular product is selling well or poorly. You can then respond accordingly. Smart Discovery goes a step further than Smart Insights and uses machine learning algorithms to identify and analyze correlations within the dataset. This feature also allows you to analyze alternative scenarios (what-if scenarios). In addition, based on the patterns in the data, you can predict outcomes and thus prepare for future developments now.
In short, SAP Analytics Cloud is a highly valuable analytics tool that quickly and easily consolidates all your data, enabling you to make data-driven decisions or implement data-driven policies.
Questions? Or would you like to learn more about SAC?
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