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Spotfire was effective in a SAP-driven procurement-related business application
Updated April 18, 2017

Spotfire was effective in a SAP-driven procurement-related business application

Roberto Jimenez | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Cloud

Overall Satisfaction with TIBCO Spotfire

Spotfire is being used by a specific department, namely Procurement. It is used to raise visibility of performance metrics as well as historical data housed in SAP BW HANA. An example of historical data is volume and price information. Spotfire enables us to quickly drill down into a specific material and understand how much product we have purchased and at what price.
  • Spotfire is oriented to the design of dashboards, not single visualizations. There is no need to design visualizations and then take them to a different "worksheet" where the layout needs to be further designed. I like the ability to design visualizations in the same place where these will be consumed, i.e., as dashboard elements.
  • Markings and Bookmarks are two powerful elements of Spotfire. Markings make the sharing of filters across visualizations intuitive and flexible. Bookmarks are extremely powerful, allowing you to create stories and share insights based on custom views.
  • The in-memory engine is super fast. As long as the data is loaded in the workbook, calculations are extremely fast.
  • Cross-tables are very easy and powerful in Spotfire.
  • My biggest disappointment with Spotfire is the way the SAP BW connector works. It is not possible to transfer 'key' values from SAP BW to Spotfire, and the data table update routine is not clear, well documented, or straightforward.
  • The calculations syntax is not very intuitive and in some cases, very complicated. The calculation editor does not give you good feedback as to why your calculation syntax is off.
  • Designing dashboards for multiple devices is a headache. There is no built-in way to design for different layouts and ensure dashboards can be consumed seamlessly on monitors, laptos, and portable devices.

Spotfire is a leader among visually driven BI software tools. It is easy to learn, creating dashboards is intuitive, and has very powerful elements. It can do the job if you commit the time and resources upfront to make sure implementation and adoption is effective.

  • Spotfire had a big impact at the beginning because it quickly raised visibility of key metrics which we were not tracking before. Over time, our need for flexibility has increased and Spotfire has not kept up with our changing needs.
Spotfire can be easily deployed in a number of enterprise settings, ranging from small companies to large organizations. I used Spotfire in a small five-user setting, but I know it is being used by large enterprises as well.

Spotfire Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
5.0
Pixel Perfect reports
7
Customizable dashboards
3
Report Formatting Templates
5
6.3
Drill-down analysis
8
Formatting capabilities
4
Integration with R or other statistical packages
Not Rated
Report sharing and collaboration
7
4.5
Publish to Web
8
Publish to PDF
1
Report Versioning
Not Rated
Report Delivery Scheduling
Not Rated
7.0
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
7
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
Not Rated
Predictive Analytics
Not Rated
8.0
Multi-User Support (named login)
8
Role-Based Security Model
8
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
8
4.0
Responsive Design for Web Access
8
Mobile Application
1
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
3
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding ()
Not Rated

Using TIBCO Spotfire

It does not provide intuitive feedback when WMS layers do not charge properly or errors occur. It experiences lag when rendering large datasets or handling complex geometries. When dashboards with geographic components work well, they are priceless. However, lots of trial and error time is consumed on the back end to produce the result, to the point that it's often easier to settle for a dashboard without geographic context, or if the dashboard is not too complex to create it on the ArcGIS API.