SAP Analytics Cloud Delivers Business Intelligence, Analytics, and Planning
SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) is a powerful solution to help you draw insights from your business data, forecast future financial trends, and much more. It combines three layers of functionality into one solution:
- Business Intelligence (BI)
- Predictive Analysis
- Planning
As it is the premier solution for SAP customers, we want to help you understand more about its capabilities so you can decide if it will deliver the functionality you need in your organization.
How Does SAP Analytics Cloud Benefit Your Company?
SAC is a cloud-based, SaaS product that provides data visualization at scale. It aggregates data from multiple sources, such as your ERP system, external data providers, or even flat-file uploads (such as Excel spreadsheets.) It can analyze your data and help you find correlations and trends that help business leaders make decisions that lead to success and growth.
More data equates to more insights. You must integrate SAC with all your business systems – financial, operational, logistical, and others – to ensure you have the complete picture of your business so you can make data-driven decisions.
SAC is powerful, and yet easy to use. It does not require one to be an IT expert to run reports and visualizations; rather, key people in any department can be quickly brought up to speed on SAC to get the business intelligence they need when they need it.
Principal Features of SAP Analytics Cloud
Data Access. SAC can connect with a variety of data sources, including flat files, OData services, and SQL databases, and has especially deep integrations with the SAP family of business solutions. It can import data into cloud storage for analysis, or it can even read directly from SAP systems, querying and calculating results in real time.
Data Modeling. This allows you to refine your results to deliver the exact information you need. You can add indicators and formulas, and modify values accordingly.
Data Visualization. A picture is worth a thousand words, and putting statistics gathered from your business data into a visual form (charts, graphs, and more) will help you quickly identify changing trends, giving you the knowledge you need to adjust course.
Predictive Analysis. To simplify and accelerate business intelligence gathering, SAC includes AI-assisted functionality including Smart Discovery, automatically identifying variances in your data that merit deeper analysis.
Planning. SAC brings your financial and operational data together for a holistic view of your business health and activities. In addition to visualization of that data, it also helps you forecast trends and plan future budgets, allowing you to play out “what-if” scenarios while deciding which direction to take.
How is SAP Analytics Cloud Licensed?
Business intelligence and planning needs vary with each organization; pricing, as well, will vary. However, SAC is licensed in two parts:
- Business Intelligence license: This allows you to connect data sources, model data, as well as create reports and visualizations.
- Planning license: This adds planning capabilities to the base package, including integration with SAP BPC to create budget versions and currency conversions, as an example.
SAP provides a free, 30-day trial of SAC so you can evaluate its suitability for your organization’s needs.
Next Steps
SAP Analytics Cloud is a leader in the Business Intelligence and Planning segment. Its innovative functionality, performance, and tight integration with other SAP business solutions make it the ideal choice for discerning business leaders who are looking for technology to gain a competitive advantage, and gain the insights they need to make data-driven decisions.
Are you interested in what SAC can do for your business? Contact our experts and let us help you find your way to deeper insights and decisions that lead to greater success and growth.
By Chandra Subramanian | CogentNext Technologies