Phocas Business Intelligence vs. SAP Lumira Discovery

If you would like your data in one place with easy access, this is the software for you. You can have data from multiple systems and bring it into one view so that you have a quick and easily visible dashboard for the data you wish to see.

Incentivized

Infographics derived from specific data sources appears to be well suited for development using Lumira. The development of executive level dashboards was less appropriate from my perspective. The software does not provide sufficient demonstration or samples for the users to learn from in my opinion.

Incentivized

• Custom reports are simple to create.
• The ability to manage users and their dashboards is solid.
• Easy to navigate web interface makes the software accessible from anywhere.

Incentivized

• SAP has built in features you would expect from a data visualization package, like easy import from other SAP systems.
• SAP has most of the typical charts that you would expect in order to visualize your data.
• SAP allows you to have multiple charts on one visualization for your data.

Incentivized

• Phocas needs to make it easier to connect to different types of databases.
• The data in Phocas needs to be updated faster in some cases.
• It needs to provide functions to create better charts and graphs.

Incentivized

• Even though the process of creating visualizations of data is now greatly improved, it could still be a lot better as users become accustomed to this kind of tool and bring forward edge cases the developers did not anticipate.
• It would be awesome to have a cross platform tool that works on more than just Windows.
• Some options for specific graphs feel limiting.

Incentivized

It is a very user-friendly product and is easy to understand. You can get your data from just a quick click and the dashboard loads. You can take the data and drill down easy to find what you are looking for.

Incentivized

SAP Lumira is very good self service analytical tool with powerful capabilities. However need to look into other SAP products in BI space, like SAP SAC. SAP Lumira is more used for custom and complex analytical need in business intelligence area. Also SAP Lumira is going out of maintenance in coming future replaced by SAP SAC.

Incentivized

Lumira is a desktop application runs in its own JVM. It installs its own java runtime libraries to avoid any core java version conflicts. The availability of the application is completely relies on individual machine hardware configuration. On a decent desktop, it performs well and always launches in either 32 or 64 bit environment based on the hosts system's OS

Incentivized

The performance is linear with amount of data that is being explored. We have done some benchmarks acquiring 10million data cells without having any performance problems. We need to make proper adjustments to jvm run time properties to start with higher heap size and other parameters that optimizes the run time performance

Incentivized

Support is responsive. You log a call and they will respond quickly and resolve your issues. We have only had great experiences with the support team.

Incentivized

It does not have many bugs or issues since not a lot of new features are being added. The customer support for SAP Lumira Discovery is good and anyone considering this as a self-service tool would be happy. It integrates well in the SAP BI suite of products and the overall experience is positive.

Incentivized

We did not take in-person training

Incentivized

Most of the user guides are pretty comprehensive and very easy to understand. The product itself is designed to be self-serve tool, did not need much of the end-user training. Most of the training we had is to how to read the data, how to explore the data, how to acquire the data etc.

Incentivized

Installing the desktop software on end-user machines is always challenging. The machine specifications are the biggest factor when running Lumira and be able to handle large datasets during data exploration. This often demands beefy machines at least for power-users. Although Lumira software licensing is not a big problem but managing partner's extensions and keeping track of their individual licenses may be an issue. If there is a way to bundle the more popular extensions such as vSQL or vOLAP should be bundled in core product and offer them as part of Lumira license instead of a separate license which causer operational burden.

Incentivized

Phocas is easy to use for end users and can be used on desktops, laptops, and phones.

Incentivized

Even though SAP Analytics Cloud is considered to be better in aspects such as data connectivity or analytics, we decided to choose Lumira as it was easier to understand, learn and use. As our business is not really that big and does not require the inclusion of large amounts of data, Lumira was overall the safest and most comfortable option. Also, some members in our team had previous knowledge so it was easier to adapt

Incentivized

Enterprise wide implementation is a challenge with data security and trustedness. No easy installation can be done across the enterprise. no upgrade paths also available from SAP. They have so much of experience with desktop implementation, there it could be a controlled environment with a capital budget. These may be resolved in the upcoming releases

Incentivized

• It has given our business a view on data
• We can access it from anywhere
• You can have multiple dashboards for different information

Incentivized

• We could obtain original data from vast and detailed corporate and personal data sources.
• We could share visual analysis results with stakeholders via the cloud, and it could also be viewed on a tablet.
• It is very flexible and accurate to use. It can be used for forecasting sales, resource planning, and scheduling.