Item: SAP Analytics Cloud
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SAP Analytics Cloud is used across the whole organization as our dashboarding tool for various business processes, including sales, employee efficiency, etc. Dashboard users can view results on a daily basis and they can also navigate to further data exploration to gain deeper insights about processes in the organization and take decisions for improvements,.

Pros and Cons

Out of the box, visual elements are great, it significantly reduces formatting time and users have better experience.
Calculations, filter application, data exploration all work really fast and smooth if compared to other tools.
Story building is simple enough for basic users to start, yet has enough advanced functionality for more complicated dashboards.
SAC offers many data source types to be used for data connections: universes, HANA, databases - everything that is needed.

There are occasional random bugs, which seem to be related to performance - where your user session suddenly ends.
Lack of UNDO button makes things more difficult.
Users have a not so good UX with tables.

Alternatives Considered

SAC definitely has better visuals and faster calculations than similar SAP products - Business Objects. Though SAC is not as mature a product as yet, and therefore BO has more functionality.

SAC offers more advanced dashboarding than Qlik and Tableau.

MS Power BI feels like a more mature product than SAC, but SAC seems to be a better solution if you already have some other SAP products. And SAC looks very good for planning solutions.

Data Integration

I really like that there is such a long list of different connection types. And even if the source is so specific that it is not on the list, you can always find good workarounds by using another connection type and doing some basic data moves.

Live connections also neatly solve issues when users don't want to upload data or need real-time data.

Collaboration and Sharing

Report distribution is a new feature, so this is yet to be seen in action. Access control is basic yet mostly sufficient. There could be some more advanced access controls though, especially if the organizational structure is more complicated. Then you need to think about how to simplify access groups to work within SAC.

Sharing and collaboration functionalities help to co-work with other employees nicely. Also, commenting section helps for this.

Likelihood to Recommend

SAP Analytics Cloud is great tool for dashboards and visual portals. It is easy to use, and the inbuilt functionality makes users actually want to interact with the content. It feels also modern and up to date. I have seen amazing scenarios and results for Cloud planning tool. From my experience, SAC is not yet well adjusted for financial report and automatic report distribution.

Great tool for interactive dashboarding

Overall Satisfaction with SAP Analytics Cloud