SAP Lumira Discovery vs. SAP BPC (Business Planning and Consolidation)

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

SAP BPC is well suited for complex planning and consolidations needs where the underlying transactional system is SAP ECC. It suits well if the organization has separate teams with BPC, ABAP, BW, Basis, Hana skillset. SAP BPC is less appropriate for organizations using Agile methodology. It is not suitable for organizations in a hyper-growth cycle as the installation and implementation is time-consuming. It will not work for organizations where the planning and budgeting needs keep changing frequently. The UI of SAP BPC is not very intuitive and very difficult to set up a dynamic dashboard for senior executives and officials of CxO.

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

• SAP BPC is real time data. You can send information into the system and see it reflected in your reports immediately. Other systems may require a manual push into a reporting system.
• SAP BPC is a shared reporting tool, so multiple users can be working in a model/environment at the same time, real time. This is especially helpful if your workbooks incorporated multiple processes requiring multiple users to get into the same model.
• SAP BPC is a powerful tool designed to help all facets of the company, from cash flow to capital expenditures to headcount management to financial planning to consolidation.

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

• Being from a law firm, the system needed a lot of custom tailoring in order to fit our full needs (although many companies could say the same thing). Although the ability to highly customize the system to the company's needs is a positive, it frequently results in the system responding in unexplainable and unrepeatable ways which negatively impacts and slows the budget process. Because of the sporadic nature and variety of the issues, we are unable to repeat them on cue and therefore cannot nail down a solution.

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

Unlike other SAP traditional products, SAP BPC was meant to be simple and familiar to financial users

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

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 need a big support team with various skillset like BPC, ABAP, BW, HANA, FICO etc

Incentivized

We did not take in-person training

Incentivized

SAP BPC training content and trainers are very good. The training is structured and provides a very good understanding of the product features and functionalities. I attended 6 separate training sessions of week-long or more. I had very good experience in all the sessions. The training is organized very well.

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

SAP Training contents are very good, informative and exhaustive.

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

The implementation was carried out in two phases spread over a period of 4 years with 2 upgrades in between. We also had multiple upgrades to HANA.

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

With Hyperion we struggled as it didn’t have integrated planning and consolidation, whereas BPC does have it. BPC is easier for reporting as it is Excel-based. Also BPC has prepackaged business process flows that helped a lot. Hyperion on the other hand has a faster response time for user queries or report generation.

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

• 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.

• Office administrators are able to enter data directly, freeing up accounting staff.
• Dependent expenses such as taxes and benefits are automatically calculated, saving time for accounting staff.
• Single source of data for budget information ensures consistency of information when reporting to senior management.

Incentivized