Juha Minkkinen
June 29 2023
To stand out in the global competition, wholesale and retail companies need to tap into process and customer data and think about the value they can extract from analytics.
For manufacturers, true digital transformation starts by envisioning where in the value chain can data be applied to make a difference.
All public sector services should be designed to serve citizens first. Digital solutions and applications must be easy to use, despite physical and cognitive disabilities.
Digital processes and data-led services help energy and utility sector companies develop a stable energy offering with transparent, customer-centric services.
Shared platforms offer fast entry to new markets, cost-efficiently and scalably. But lasting value add comes from cross-industry collaboration and linking products with complimentary services.
Digitally disrupted, the companies in the banking, finance and insurance sector must actively innovate new approaches to build omnichannel customer experiences that fully utilize data.
While medical device software is strictly regulated, there's room for innovations that make life easier for patients and caregivers. Stable and secure data flow is a must.
June 29 2023
Do you have to plan with solutions that don’t support your business environment, company structure, or planning process – even though this means a decrease in planning efficiency and accuracy? We’ve met plenty of customers who are struggling with the same issues. They suffer from slow planning processes due to process or data inconsistencies, different data sources, and a heterogeneous system environment. SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) is a mature solution that can help improve your planning.
The first question you might be asking is why has SAP developed a new planning tool when they’ve had a good business planning and consolidation (BPC) tool for many years? Indeed, many customers have expressed their concern after hearing that SAP BPC will no longer be supported after the end of 2027.
The reason why is that SAP has chosen cloud-based solutions as its strategic direction. Cloud-based solutions offer new innovative features, better integration, and ease of use. When using cloud solutions in a browser, they offer a more flexible and secure way to work compared to traditional, often inflexible planning solutions.
To be honest, I was disappointed when I used SAC planning for the first time at a TechEd hands-on session in 2015. Fortunately, SAP took the feedback they received seriously and invested in product development. In recent years, SAC has developed considerably – and in product comparisons it has been highly ranked.
SAC includes a wide selection of features familiar from other planning tools, such as:
In addition, new innovative features have been developed in the tool, such as private (user-specific) planning versions, predictive planning, and the Value Driver Tree. The Value Driver Tree describes the value flows passing through the model and their hierarchical dependencies. It supports manual adjustment of values and enables a detailed visualization of the effects of different expense and income groups on top-level metrics.
SAC also offers a wide range of features for generating data and simulations on the fly including:
SAP HANA provides an automated predictive library equivalent to SAP Predictive Analytics as well as the SAP Analytics Cloud Smart Predict engine. Application developers can use predictive models directly in the HANA environment using different programming languages such as R, Python, or SQL.
SAC can be integrated into existing systems. SAC can be integrated with, among others, SAP BW/4HANA, S/4HANA, SuccessFactors, and Salesforce. Data from other systems can be imported using OData or a supplier-specific interface. Data can be written to SAP BW/4HANA 2.0, SAP Datasphere, and S/4HANA. In addition, it’s possible to export data to other systems using OData or a supplier-specific interface.
In sum, SAP Analytics Cloud is one of SAP's innovative solutions that provides comprehensive support for the planning process – and can be easily implanted into existing architectures thanks to a wide range of interface adapters. SAC provides planners with easy-to-use smart functions and visualization capabilities. SAC also enables making sub-plans and forecasts, combining operational and financial plans of different organizations into one common plan.
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