Great tool for interactive dashboarding
July 28, 2020

Great tool for interactive dashboarding

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SAP Analytics Cloud

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,.
  • 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.
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.
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.
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.

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.

SAP Analytics Cloud Feature Ratings

Long-term financial planning
8
Financial budgeting
8
Forecasting
8
Scenario modeling
8
Management reporting
8
Financial data consolidation
7
Multi-currency management
7
Intercompany Eliminations
7
Minority Ownership
7
Local and consolidated reporting
7
Detailed Audit Trails
8
Financial Statement Reporting
7
Management Reporting
8
Excel-based Reporting
4
Automated board and financial reporting
5
Personalized dashboards
9
Color-coded scorecards
9
KPIs
9
Cost and profitability analysis
9
Key Performance Indicator setting
9
Benchmarking with external data
9
Flat file integration
7
Excel data integration
7
Direct links to 3rd-party data sources
7
Pixel Perfect reports
9
Customizable dashboards
10
Report Formatting Templates
4
Drill-down analysis
10
Formatting capabilities
10
Integration with R or other statistical packages
10
Report sharing and collaboration
9
Publish to Web
6
Publish to PDF
6
Report Versioning
8
Report Delivery Scheduling
5
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
10
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
9
Predictive Analytics
8
Multi-User Support (named login)
8
Role-Based Security Model
8
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
8
Single Sign-On (SSO)
8
Responsive Design for Web Access
10
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
9