Item: SAP Analytics Cloud
Rating: 10
Author: Eric Halbur

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SAC is currently being used for various POCs across production, HR, and IT. The tool is helping us to investigate data for decision making as well as provide visual KPIs. Currently, IT staff has been doing most of the POC development, but we hope to use SAC for business end-user reporting as well.

Pros and Cons

Multiple visualization options.
Data insights.
Easy to get started with file data uploads.

Pixel perfect formatting is difficult.
Viewing all data imported in a simple tabular format is difficult for data checking.
The tool is in rapid flux as it’s quite new.

Alternatives Considered

SAP Lumira Discovery

SAP seems to be giving its highest focus to SAC over the Lumira suite, so we think it’s likely a better path for us to go down as we were not entrenched with other tools. SAC performance during design and consume time seems much better than our experience with Lumira.

Data Integration

We have only leveraged the Excel upload, universe, and query type connections, all via Model import. However, we hope to pilot live connections to BW as well as eventually HANA connections once in HANA. From the options available in SAC it appears there are several connectors that are available for use.

Collaboration and Sharing

Sharing reports or data models with others are straight forward and easy. We have not put much security around our reports as of yet, nor have we done high amounts of collaboration due to still being in a pilot mode. Early on we did run into some issues to try to take over administration of other models.

Other Software Used

SAP Lumira Discovery

Likelihood to Recommend

SAC is quick to get started with. It’s best suited to create visualizations to be directly consumed online. It can be used for executive dashboards, or more detailed visualizations. Likely if it’s needed to do detailed record analysis, other tools may be better suited like analysis for Excel. SAC Smart Discovery is very useful to help draw insights on data relationships that may not be known.

SAP Analytics Review

Overall Satisfaction with SAP Analytics Cloud